Business Intelligence

The Business Value of Successful Business Intelligence

So why would an organization endeavor to implement a strategic business intelligence

program? It appears that there are, in fact, many organizations that have

Introduction

various tactical implementations that are quite successful. Is it not just about

using a technology in the areas that are needed?

It is true that a technology should be applied to the areas it can enable. However,

most organizations—due to their tactical implementations of BI to

date—have not yet realized the mission-critical value that BI can provide to the

reaction time, monitoring, and predictive ability that can be found in a successful

implementation. The ability to measure and monitor how organizations are executing

against corporate goals—to understand whether they are on or off track

and why—and the ability to change direction when necessary has not yet been

enabled due to the limitations of the current environment.

If we were to compare this situation with other, more mature technologies that

are considered mission-critical in today’s organizations—let’s take e-mail, for

example—would it be efficient, productive, and cost-effective to have pockets of

employees on a variety of different e-mail systems, some of which might not

integrate or communicate effectively with others? How would this situation

impact the productivity of an organization’s work force?

Consider a customer view: if the information is siloed across various departments,

how can a consistent view be understood and accessed to provide the best

possible service to the party in question with tactical silos of information? Is it

productive to manually pull together this information? Is it accurate? Efficient?

We believe that a strategic, enterprise business intelligence program offers

higher value to our companies, especially in today’s fast-paced, changing

environment.

● First, it can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT and increase

the return on investment (ROI) for software and hardware. It also

increases the amount of time IT can spend on strategic work rather than

duplicate manual labor. This creates increased IT efficiency.

● Second, it can leverage the IT infrastructure and a set of skills to give

business users direct access to enterprise-wide information so they can

make critical decisions. This increases the company’s overall productivity

and business efficiency.

● Last, and best of all, a successful BI program can increase collaboration

and leverage the decision-support structure across the enterprise to

increase overall business effectiveness. This includes a better utilization of

resources, a critical consistent view of reliable data across the entire

The Business Value of Successful Business Intelligence

corporation, and the implementation of metrics to measure the progress of

key decision areas. Indeed, a successful BI program can provide

executives with the visibility they need into the performance drivers that

propel the business forward.

However, in most cases, organizations tend to focus on only the IT efficiencies

that the BI technology can provide, resulting in a continued value justification

exercise and a difficult time in providing a business case. If we consider the

business value hierarchy offered in the book The Performance Manager4 and

depicted in Figure I.1, we can see that the three levels of value are not all of

equal worth. And as you move up the value scale, they become more difficult to

measure—especially

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