Executive Dashboard: Boost your bottom line with business intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) tools are designed to optimise the enterprise's use of its existing and future business information. Used by business units as an "intelligent interface" laid over the corporate systems infrastructure, BI can help the business extract maximum value out of IT investments by making crucial information available to executives to support critical decisions.

Regardless of vertical market sectors, the key benefit from a scalable BI solution is the ability to facilitate decision-making at every organisational level, from production, financial and sales management to the corner office.

As such, chief executives along with their management teams can quickly view the 'executive dashboard' and drill down business intelligence data from multiple dimensions, including the company, business, staff and customer with the right BI tools at hand.

At the end of the day, BI tools can help to provide insight into the customer base, supplier relationships, and the company's own organisation and performance to help increase revenues and drive down costs.

Promoting decision making for effective action is what business intelligence is all about. BI focuses on business process improvement, guiding users on a recommended series of steps for making a specific type of decision. The expected result is better decisions and increased business performance.

However, before investing in a BI project, there are important questions to be answered: are the anticipated objectives being realised?

What must organisations do to be successful? Do these applications provide a positive financial return to meet the demanding hurdles all technology investments must meet today?

After a recent IDC study of 43 US and European enterprises on business analytics solutions (a subset of BI), the message is clear: businesses that make an investment in analytics can achieve a significant and rapid return because of increased efficiencies and expanded opportunity.

The range of return on investment (ROI) results from these business analytics projects, outlined in the figure below, is impressive. Returns range from 17 to more than 2,000 per cent.

While 46 per cent of the organisations generated an ROI of 100 per cent or less, 34 per cent generated an ROI of 101 to 1,000 per cent, and 20 per cent reported ROI returns of 1,000 per cent or more.

Using the payback period as the measure of success, the range of results outlined in the next figure is equally impressive. Payback period is another measurement often used to evaluate an investment opportunity.

It measures how long it will take for a particular investment to break even. Of the 43 companies that participated in this study, 49 per cent experienced payback in one year or less, 32 per cent experienced payback in one to three years, and 19 per cent experienced payback in three years or more.

The writer is a analyst at IDC