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Special Report: Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is designed, just like the Ronseal adverts say, to do exactly what it says on the tin: provide intelligence to the business. But it's not quite that simple, because over the years the demands of the average enterprise in terms of access to, presentation of and dissemination of their critical business data have risen dramatically.
BI has had to develop just as rapidly in order to meet the needs of the modern enterprise when it comes to the treatment of one of their most valuable assets: their data.
There was a time when business intelligence was designed to query the data from operational systems: 'how much revenue did the Nottingham branch make last month?' It wasn't too important if it took the IT department a week to program the software to answer the query, as long as it was answered eventually.
But roll forward 10 to 15 years and what the business now expects from business intelligence would be unrecognisable to the IT department back then: 'how do sales of discounted Nike trainers in Nottingham compare to sales of the same trainers at full price in Birmingham between 9am and 12pm today, and what is the impact of each of those metrics on targets at those branches for the month on the associated balanced scorecards?'
The need for far more responsive answers to data queries, and for far more complex analysis of data than businesses even dreamed of 15 years ago, created a bottleneck in the IT department, as it could not keep up with the demands of the business for new reports, new metrics and new views into their data.
But today BI has caught up. The leading vendors in the space have managed to combine the complexity of data analysis with ease of use, and in so doing been able to put the power of BI in the hands of the business - where it should have been all along. Coupled with real-time or near real-time data analysis, and we are seeing a new dawn for BI.
But just as IT needs to know what the business wants from its data, the business needs to know what it can get from its BI tools and how that can be turned into value. In this special report we look at how BI can be aligned with the business, and how a number of real-world BI projects have added value to the enterprise - while also highlighting the potential challenges that may crop up along the way.
We also look at the parallel trend for corporate performance management - putting BI data into the context of enterprise-wide performance and underpinning compliance initiatives; and we look too at the value of geographic data in BI, and the new wave of analytic applications. There is also a look at whether the emergent discipline of enterprise information integration dovetails with business intelligence.
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