Get more from BI by understanding your analysis needs

Overview

Companies often implement BI as a monolithic, one-size-fits-all solution that fails to understand the unique needs of each audience within the organization. The net impact of this imprecise deployment strategy can include:

• Casual users may be overwhelmed with irrelevant, overly detailed information
• Power users cannot dig as deep as they would like
• Executives may lack clear and flexible visibility into real-time organizational performance
Failure to understand the unique needs of the various audiences and related stakeholders constrains the full potential of BI and introduces inefficiencies that can reduce or eliminate BI’s return on investment (ROI).

By tailoring these analytical tools and processes toward each audience, companies of all sizes and in all sectors increase their chances of cashing in on BI’s holy grail: Empowerment. Effectively tuned BI deployment empowers virtually any individual anywhere within the organizational hierarchy to leverage BI in a way that facilitates optimal performance within that given role.


Business problems (Limited audience)

The bottom line benefits of BI are often not fully realized by many organizations due to limited user adoption. By broadening the appeal and use of BI beyond the traditional domain of specialists, power users and senior leaders, organizations can drive more aggressive returns on BI investment by unleashing its potential across the organization:

• Executives can see at a glance how the organization is performing, then quickly drill down to an appropriate level of detail that allows them to make fast, effective decisions
• Business and financial analysts can dig deeper and turn analyses around with greater speed and precision to improve the quality of data they’re producing for themselves and for others
• Business users, who have traditionally relied on specialists for analytical expertise, can increasingly take control of the tools and pursue business-specific analysis on their own
BI takes knowledge that usually lies latent in extensive pools of corporate and external data and unleashes its potential. To accomplish this, companies must ask the following three key questions:

1. How are we doing?
2. Why are we doing it?
3. What should we be doing?



Business Drivers

Between salaries and benefits, employees represent a large, often dominant component of the average company’s cost structure. Not getting the most out of this huge investment – employee-related ROI, if you will – is a huge drag on the bottom line.

Unfortunately, many organizations fail to derive value from their people. Employees often lack visibility into their roles – something that can hamper even the lowest-ranking staff members and impact overall performance. When a major casino operator was looking for ways to grow its revenue base, it needed to decide whether to invest $1.5 billion in a new facility. But before proceeding, it realized it didn’t have a clear understanding of what its customers actually did when they came into the casino. Without this knowledge, it was hardly in a position to conclude that it had already maximized the revenue-generating capacity of its existing facility. It needed to give its employees at all levels of the organization the ability to track activities, assess results and make better business decisions. Only then would it be able to decide whether to build new or optimize its existing infrastructure.

Of course, to accomplish the seemingly impossible, workers at all levels of any organization require greater visibility into how the organization operates and how its performance rates against established baselines. A closer look at the key roles within the typical organization sheds additional light on the tactical and strategic benefits inherent in extending BI to the widest possible internal audience.


Conclusions

It is increasingly clear that a single flavour of BI is woefully insufficient for most modern organizations. Depending on who is doing the analysis and where they live on the org chart, their needs for specific types of analysis are diverse enough to require unique tools and processes. Traditional BI won’t cut it because it just doesn’t put enough capability into enough hands to make enough of a difference to the average company still struggling with the effects of – and the opportunities presented by – the current economic climate.

At the same time, it has also become apparent that for BI to realize its full potential as a driver of business growth, it must be deployed beyond the traditionally limited scope of dedicated analysts and senior leaders. By extending the focused analytical capabilities of audiences such as business managers who have traditionally relied on others for this capability, organizations empower ever larger numbers of employees to get more done in less time, and to consume fewer resources in the process. They give greater flexibility to their people, allowing them to improve individual and organizational agility. This kind of responsiveness is the lifeblood of survival and future competitiveness.

Depending on need – to the widest range of organizational roles. It’s been designed to maximize the benefit of BI without necessarily forcing users to adapt workflows that don’t fit the way they work. It’s more than BI for the rest of us. It’s BI for the future of your business, whatever that future may bring.