For the enterprise, the goals
of business intelligence are to know everything that the entire global
company is doing, and to be able to extract analysis from that
knowledge in as near to real time as possible, in order to make
decisions, and act.
The ability to act effectively, as a
corporate body, is a benchmark of agility. Agility is the survival
life-blood of the modern enterprise. Business intelligence (BI) brings
the first part of the equation: dependable, accurate, up-to-date
knowledge.
There should be no surprise that IT regards the BI infrastructure as a critical piece of the enterprise:
“In terms of BI, CIOs were concerned about the risks
that surround placing comprehensive, critical tools in the hands of
capable people when there are no guidelines in place to ensure that the
tools are effectively used. Thus, 53% of them were engaged in a BI
standardization activity. Most CIOs understand that standardization is
a critical step in establishing necessary guidelines, and essential to
a strategic BI deployment. Many also understand the benefits that a
Business Intelligence Competency Center (also see my post about BICCs)
can provide them, not the least of which are standardization and
increased transparency of information throughout the organization."
From Standardize to Reduce Cost and Improve Process and Strategic Decisions
On the other side of this view, however, it
must be seen that a vast amount of BI is gathered in ways that may seem
mundane: how much business is run on the simple desktop spreadsheet?
(The answer is: a lot.)
It becomes critical to look at
Microsoft, and its Office suite, in particular Excel, when considering
the future of BI. According to a new Forrester BI report, Microsoft says there are 400 million users of Excel throughout the world.
“The study cites that an estimated 50 percent to 80
percent of companies continue to use standalone spreadsheets for
critical business functions; however, 90 percent of spreadsheets
contain some errors due to bad formulas, incorrect data entry, and
errors in access and placement of data.” – (Spread)sheet Music
Spreadsheets are the tool of choice for BI,
and spreadsheets are here to stay, as the Forester study concludes. The
task for IT and software developers is not to replace them, but to
improve them, and bring them to the sharpness that befits
mission-critical tools.
As Forester also concludes in its
study, Microsoft will play a large role in the evolution of
spreadsheets and other applications. Microsoft’s development path in
this respect is therefore a key component to business worldwide,
especially since the Office suite comprises so much more than the
spreadsheet, and integrates with the Windows email and internet
linkages.
When Dovetail CRM
applications bring added capability to the Amdocs Clarify database, in
part by enabling data transfer through Outlook Express, Dovetail CRM is playing a role in today’s evolution of business intelligence. See “Email Integration with Clarify” for more detail on this.
At
the core of the BI process resides the swarm of all the singular pieces
of information processed by the enterprise workers as they go about
their day. Making it easy for the worker to gather files and histories
into the appropriate case, and close the case with appropriate filing
into the knowledgebase, is the lubricant that gives BI its power.
As
the confluence of all enterprise data gathers force, pieces of the
system are starting to pull together. Performance Management (PM),
formerly a distinct discipline, increasingly now delivers its analytic
summaries to executives in the same dashboard as BI reports. One study
argues for the complete merger of PM and BI.
“Historically, corporate PM can trace its origins to
the finance department, and was originally associated with analytic
applications for finance, budgeting, statutory reporting, and planning.
Simultaneously, BI emerged as the tool of choice for reporting
operational metrics for departments such as HR, sales, and operations.
It was only a matter of time before vendors and customers alike
realized the synergies between the two.” See BI and PM: Two Sides of the Same Coin
We’ll take a closer look at Microsoft next.
