Executive Dashboard: Unlock the power of dormant data

Most organisations today capture and process huge quantities of data daily. The challenge: transforming this data into valuable information that can be used within the organisation
Business processes of the 21st century must be more efficient and dynamic in order to build and sustain value across the organisation and beyond.

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions have the potential to realise these goals, driving operational excellence and truly managing performance across the enterprise.

The underlying principle of BI, since its conception in the late 1980s, is to enable companies to gather data and formulate information in order to derive knowledge.

Companies are, however, only now – more than 15 years later – understanding how BI benefits everyone that uses it. Plus, the growth of e-business and internal and external data along with operational excellence has kept the spotlight on BI.

BI has moved beyond traditional data warehousing solutions, which in turn has made it even more challenging to create the relevant business knowledge.

BI now spans all subject areas of business and it is now even more critical to understand the solutions your company implements – whether it's technology, business or finance – in order to derive Return on Investment (ROI).

The benefits of BI solutions are clear. For one, BI enables more efficient reporting. Without it many companies often have teams of employees that spend hours gathering, aggregating and analysing information from different systems in order to provide timely reports to management.

Indeed, BI can significantly reduce the time – and subsequent money – spent on developing these reports.

Decision-making is also improved as companies can access, view and analyse numbers that were too unwieldy, distributed, or expensive to obtain.

Importantly, this enables companies to use the improved reporting information to identify where they are missing revenue generation opportunities, to reduce overhead costs based on utilisation, and to manage billing and accounts receivables.

Companies can also use BI to identify customer and market trends and use that information for forecasting, planning, marketing and promotions. And in cases where a customer is part of a supply chain, companies can also open access to its BI information in order to reduce management and streamline interaction.

Planning

The success of a BI implementations is unfortunately not guaranteed and organisations considering implementing BI should do a significant amount of pre-implementation planning.
This includes cleaning and validating data, and defining user requirements.

BI is like any other technology deployment – if the users won't use it, the ROI is always negative. Implementers of BI, albeit VARs (value-added resellers) or integrators, must have an in-depth understanding of the technology in order to realise usability and subsequent business value. Secondly, training is also critical.

Although most solutions feature intuitive interfaces, it is still important to make sure that users know how to quickly access and modify reports – thus benefiting from it. A BI investment can be the means to leverage existing enterprise data to improve performance and reduce costs. No IT investment is fail-proof, but a pre-deployment analysis can help you determine where your key costs and benefits lie.

The author is senior analyst at IDC Middle East and North Africa.