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.

The Importance of Being Accurate (Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting: A Critical Business Process)

The pressures on CFOs are increasing in this age of governmental regulations, financial markets and the internal need to provide accurate financial data more quickly. These pressures are rising so much that CFOs are re-examining the structure and operation of their organizations. Beyond their most basic job function of being responsible for all things financial, both internal to the company and external, they are being challenged to partner with operational areas to drive consistency and efficiency across the entire organization.

Consistency and efficiency contribute to enhancing the company’s performance and the achievement of key business goals, operationally and financially. A performance management framework enables the stakeholders to define plans to achieve these goals, monitor the progress and adjust the plans based upon actual input. Planning and monitoring, therefore, become an integral aspect throughout a business cycle.


Why Planning is Important

As organization’s senior leadership sets goals for milestones to be reached, it is the responsibility of the management team to create initiatives to achieve these milestones. Each will yield an outcome and require a set of resources – it is these outcomes and resource requirements that need to be planned.

For example, an organization that provides services is required to forecast the offerings demanded in the near future, and determine whether they are equipped to meet that need. “Will the sales force be able to effectively drive significant demand?” “Is the delivery capacity available to meet the anticipated demand that will be generated by the sales force?” These questions can only be answered once a sales plan has been created and compared to the staffing demand.

These planning goals affect internal, external and financial decisions based upon the organization’s commitment to these objectives. Therefore, it is critical that these commitments are achieved and that the associated processes provide accurate results.

Most planning processes have been an evolution within a company as organizations have grown. Typically, plans are created within spreadsheets and shared among a small number of those who direct the business. As organizations grow, their supporting infrastructure generally grows faster than the planning infrastructure since planning occurs once a year. As organizations mature, the planning processes required mature as well. However, the plans are still managed within spreadsheets.

A Painful Process

Compiling data for analysis to create each fiscal year plan requires large efforts because the contributors for this data are not centrally located and they each manage their information in different spreadsheets. Thus, the CFO and finance teams spend massive amounts of time collecting this information to generate plans.

Because the effort is disparate and manual, it requires three months of the finance team’s devoted effort to consolidate and prepare the plan for the next fiscal year. And, if time allows, the team updates the forecast and plan quarterly to reflect changed conditions, whether it is needed or not.

To be more effective, companies need to find a way to make revisions to plans and forecasts in real-time when changes begin to occur. But, for most, there is no mechanism in place to initiate this process. Without the planning process being improved, updating plans more often than quarterly distracts the contributors from their primary tasks of revenue generation. And, no longer is the plan produced three months ago relevant for next month, let alone for the year of the original plan.


A New Approach – Adapting a Performance Management Framework

Many organizations will employ rolling forecasts, where the future months are updated by those responsible for that aspect of the organization. Rolling forecasts can provide more current plans, but can also be time consuming and take people away from more important work. And, their input may not reflect actual situations and not be timely enough.

A performance management framework enables organizations to set goals they hope to achieve, metrics by which to measure the success of the business units’ achievements, monitor the results and adjust the plan to ensure goals are attained. Whether an organization is looking to create a performance management framework or if one already exists, the following changes improve the efficiency of the performance management team and enable the organization to react more quickly as their business climate changes.


1.Goals, Short-Term supporting Long-Term Objectives: Organizations set long-term objectives which are communicated both internally and external. These provide insight into the direction the organization is heading. Their short-term goals should provide a foundation to achieve their long-term goals, yet provide more flexibility to adjust to short-term changes within the economy. Enlisting business units to drive initiatives to support these goals is critical to the success of the performance management program. The success of these initiatives depends upon how quickly business units realize a change is occurring, the root cause of the change and how quickly corrective action can be taken.


2.Identify Internal and External Drivers: Organizations should seek to understand the internal and external factors that impact their success. These factors become the inputs to the planning aspect of the performance management framework. By altering these inputs, a spectrum of varied outcomes can be identified, providing a range of an organization’s critical success factors. For example, home builders would monitor interest rate futures, unemployment and any new home purchase incentives backed by the government.


3.Constantly Evolve: Once the plan is developed, these drivers are monitored for any changes. Enabling the change to be analyzed to determine the root cause will enable the correct actions to be taken. If the deviation is significant and the analysis warrants, then re-planning would be initiated to alter the planned outcomes and adjust business decisions to minimize the negative impact and maximize the opportunity, which ever the case may be.


4.Integrated Information Systems and Business Processes: Information systems need to support the processing of data dynamically and in real-time to enable the identification of variances as soon as they occur. This information needs to be presented in a clear, concise manner that will enable the responsible person to query the data in a way that provides enough information to take necessary actions.
One of the actions would be to initiate re-planning activities to account for the significant change in business drivers. This would involve alerting the planning contributors to submit their revised plans based upon the changed information, and having the planning system set up to accept these new plans immediately. The delays between data analysis and initiating the corrective business actions must be minimized. It is therefore essential to tightly integrate information systems and the corresponding business processes.

Why On-Demand BI?

On-demand BI solutions, which are hosted by service providers and accessed by users over the Internet, offer all of the benefits of traditional BI solutions while substantially improving the economic bottom line. On-demand solutions provide powerful and flexible business insight, but are faster, easier, and less costly than custom “behind the firewall” solutions. The business benefits of On-demand BI are compelling and real.

On-demand Business Intelligence (BI) solutions offer a timely and cost-effective resource for businesses of all sizes to maximize their business potential while minimizing costs. Relative totraditional business intelligence solutions, on-demand BI solutions offer substantial business
benefits, including:

• Increased Access
• Faster Return on Investment (ROI)
• Lower Implementation Costs
• Lower Ongoing Costs
• Easier Budget Approval
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Greater Visibility
• Low Risk – High Reward

To make the most of on-demand BI, businesses should look for a solution that offers a breadth of features that are quick to deploy, scalable, and easy to use. To find the best solution for them, each business should consider their own unique needs with respect to:

• Multi-source data capability
• Analysis and Reporting
• Scalability
• Automation
• Flexibility

Once these needs are determined, the best match can be found among available on-demand BI vendors. Some Industry experts also recommends considering the following characteristics before selecting a vendor:

• Technology
• Terms of Service
• Professional Services Offered
• Pricing
• Financial Stability

Ultimately, no matter which vendor is chosen, any business is likely to benefit from the use of an on-demand BI solution. Through the on-demand model, BI is becoming much more accessible, less expensive, and less risky, while the benefits are made more compelling for all.

The Conventional Approach, and Why it Doesn’t Always Work (Data Quality)

Conventional data quality tools are designed to be used by specialist data administrators, working in concert with data stewards, who are technically-oriented business users. The conventional approach to data quality is typically centralized within the IT management group, and depends on specialist analysts and batch processes to work. Periodically, an administrator profiles existing data, and applies software tools to normalize/standardize entities such as street- and business-names. Once data is standardized, additional routines then attempt to identify duplicate records and errors, and specialists will then instigate business processes to merge previously fragmented data.

Obviously, this conventional approach is a start. By profiling and analyzing data, organizations discover (often for the first time) how serious their data quality issues really are. By standardizing data, some of the inconsistencies that cause conventional software to fail are eliminated.

But how is it that these data quality issues happened in the first place? And how can organizations avoid them recurring? Conventional approaches don’t really address these issues.

Data quality problems don’t happen by accident: they usually reflect either:

• Errors at the point of data entry, or….
• Inconsistencies and differences among internal systems, or…
• Inconsistencies among 3rd party and various internal data sources

The conventional data quality approach doesn’t address any of these problems at the root. Instead, it looks to clean up problems after the fact. A better alternative combines this conventional data quality approach with one that is more dynamic, less centralized, and doesn’t depend on rigid data standardization. One that attacks data quality issues at the root cause, in real time.

So, one of the keys to data quality is to empower people responsible for data entry to find what they’re looking for at the beginning of the process. Users need an easy to use facility, built-in to their existing business processes, that works reliably despite typical data errors and inconsistencies. The trick is to ensure that users come up with the right match the first time: studies show that front line personnel resist having to conduct multiple requests. Conventional, batch-oriented data quality software doesn’t help here at all. Moreover, users shouldn’t have to use a separate GUI. The matching facility should be integrated with the application they’re already using, and require minimal change to the existing workflow.

The most impactful business benefits are downstream – in the unrealized economies of scale and improved efficiency by not throwing a lot of people and repeated work effort at the multiple problems created by poor data quality.

El E-Business como anillo al dedo para subcontratar los análisis de datos

A simple vista parecía ilógico: ceder el control sobre información crítica del propio negocio so pretexto de subcontratar un data warehouse (bodega de datos). Pero a algunas empresas les resulta más fácil concentrarse en desarrollar, manufacturar y comercializar sus productos o servicios básicos y dejar el análisis de datos a expertos en la materia.

¿A qué se debe esta moda? Pues a internet y a los grandes cambios que están ocurriendo a medida que en todo género de negocios está arraigando la administración de las relaciones con los clientes (CRM), que es como la aplicación en el "mundo real" de los data warehouses, según Scott Nelson, de The Gartner Group. "¿Para qué recolectar datos, si no se usan para mejorar el mercado y así sacarles provecho y dinero?", se pregunta Nelson. Y esto es lo que está haciendo Jewelry.com, empresa vendedora de joyería por internet.

Outsourcing: toda una joya

Jewelry nació en noviembre pasado y desde entonces entregó sus datos de número de visitantes a otra empresa, Candle, para que efectúe embodegamiento, data mining y demás análisis. Específicamente, la firma recurrió al servicio llamado CandleNet E-Business Assurance Network (traducible como "red de aseguramiento de negocios electrónicos de CandleNet", EBAN), que proporciona monitoreo de servicio de aplicaciones, recolecta datos sobre tiempo de respuesta, acumula datos para warehousing con los correspondientes reportes y realiza análisis de procesamientos en línea. Después, mediante un navegador, los interesados ven los datos analizados en el portal de EBAN.

El análisis de los clics de visitantes de Jewelry.com durante el primer mes de operación arrojó 15,000 visitantes al día, aunque 90% no pasó de la home-page, porque el sitio era demasiado lento. Jewelry rápidamente mejoró el desempeño añadiendo servidores catching Sandpiper 500 de la proveedora de servicios de internet Digital Island. De repente, "10 veces más visitantes penetraban más fondo en el site, con lo que las ventas aumentaron", comenta Paul Rajewski, de Jewelry. La empresa tuvo una buena temporada navideña, pues más de 1,200 clientes compraron joyas por el web, al paso que el sistema EBAN de Candle seguía el rastro a la métrica del desempeño, para que los clientes no quedaran empantanados con la lentitud.

Según Rajeswki, un rápido desempeño es fundamental para que los clientes en línea se sientan felices: "Hay que proponerse un gasto mínimo de 200,000 dólares en un sistema de comercio electrónico -considera-. Nosotros pudimos establecer nuestro sitio web en seis semanas, pero lo hemos reforzado al doble para reducir cuellos de botella y obtener un desempeño más rápido".

La actual configuración de Jewelry.com abarca 20 equipos Sun Microsystems con 40 GB en RAM y rapidez de línea de 45 Mbps, además de los servidores antes mencionados, que quitan una enormidad de carga a los servidores de la firma del Sol. Jewelry usa un paquete de software de e-commerce de Intershop, con lo que el desarrollo del site aumenta de velocidad.

Esta reciente tienda web ha comenzado a publicitar sus artículos en línea, registrar a los visitantes y ofrecer promociones especiales para que regresen. Para el Día de San Valentín, Rajewski pagó anuncios dirigidos a lectores varones en Sports Illustrated y The New York Times para analizar la proporción de lectores varones y mujeres que compraban en el site. En los anuncios se ofrecía un descuento con tal que los compradores llenaran información demográfica básica. "Los resultados, una vez analizados, nos servirán para formular nuestros planes de publicidad en los medios para el año que viene", argumenta.

Beneficios:

· Reduce el costo inicial de instalar una bodega de datos o data warehouse
· Subcontratar la administración avanzada de datos pone esta tarea en manos de expertos
· Permite que un negocio pueda concentrarse en sus productos y servicios básicos
· El análisis de los datos de visitas a un site y demás información en línea se facilita a los ASP y demás proveedores de servicios de análisis

Inconvenientes

· Descargar aplicaciones clave de inteligencia del negocio exige prestar atención a toda una gama de temas sobre confidencialidad, concurrencia y seguridad
· Las bodegas de datos tradicionales están todavía mal preparadas para la subcontratación
· Distanciar a los usuarios de la bodega de datos puede resultar problemático. Si las bodegas de datos deben servir para algo, tiene que existir una estrecha relación entre usuarios y desarrolladores de la bodega

De los datos a las Deciciones rentables

La nueva economía ha empujado a las compañías a tomar decisiones más rápidas y efectivas a través del análisis de toda su información de nivel general a nivel detallado, información que viene de fuentes de datos cada día más complejas.

En este sentido, cada vez es más evidente el valor que tiene el conocimiento para las compañías, el cual proporciona hoy en día una mayor ventaja competitiva. A este respecto, el concepto de Business Intelligent (BI, Inteligencia de Negocios) está de moda. Sus aplicaciones.

para la toma de decisiones se convierten en una herramienta para los gerentes, no sólo de informática, sino de cualquier área de dirección de la empresa.

Hoy en día, la inteligencia de negocios se considera una nueva disciplina que pretende convertir el gran volumen de datos que normalmente tiene almacenada una organización en información útil para la toma de decisiones. Este es un proceso apoyado por herramientas modernas de tecnología de información, que permiten al gerente explorar, conocer y descubrir información de su propia empresa para producirla en conocimiento para la organización.

Principales Aplicaciones

Las aplicaciones de Business Intelligent ofrecen actualmente las herramientas más flexibles, sólidas y potentes para la distribución de informes, análisis de datos y consultas dinámicas de una variedad de fuentes de datos de empresas por los usuarios finales.

Los informes y otros datos de salida de conocimiento creados a partir de fuentes de datos de Business Intelligent se distribuyen generalmente a través de aplicaciones tipo portal. Estas capacidades combinadas deberán situar a las aplicaciones de BI en la lista de herramientas a considerar por cualquier empresa que esté emprendiendo la implementación de una solución de Gestión del Conocimiento.

El énfasis en el acceso a la información está conduciendo a la mayoría de las empresas y organizaciones que abordan sus necesidades de administración del conocimiento a comenzar por analizar sus aplicaciones en portales corporativos.
Estos últimos permiten el acceso a una amplia variedad de fuentes de datos estructuradas y no estructuradas a través de una sola interfaz, generalmente personalizada y basada en un modelo Web. Los portales simplifican el acceso a los datos abriendo ventanas a múltiples fuentes.