A recent article in CFO.com explores the benefits — and challenges — of implementing Business Intelligence (BI) capability company wide. Traditionally BI tools were deployed within silos and limited to tactical usage. Now BI is getting more strategic.
Features of Strategic Business Intelligence
- Cross-function, department, and organization (vs. single function, siloed solution)
- Wide end-user usage: hundreds, if not thousands of users (vs. a small number of tech savvy power users)
- Active, driven by exceptions and rules (vs. passive, driven by reports)
- Web deployment via portals and with wireless support (vs. client/server deployment)
- Forcasting capabilities vs. historical analysis
- Solution orientation vs. product/tool-centric
Source: Butler Group, via CFO.com
The good news is some of the barriers to preventing enterprise-wide
strategic BI are falling fast. Notably, the technology has improved in
leaps and bounds. Over the past couple of years, innovation and heavy
investment by both large and small vendors — not to mention plenty of
end-user customization — have brought a host of BI tools capable of
extracting and integrating data from all sorts of sources and turning
it into operational intelligence on which to base forward-looking
strategy. "Today's business intelligence should be able to direct you
in terms of what sales you should do next — predictive modeling, sales
pipelining, forecasting what market segments have the highest
propensity to buy a service," says Andreas Bitterer, a Hamburg-based
analyst at Gartner, a market research company.Source: CFO.com
Connecting the Dots
Janet Kersnar, CFO Europe
June 12, 2006
