More on Business Intelligence

All organizations, whether business, government, charitable, or otherwise; have limited resources for performing their missions. Companies are forced to make do with what they have — all the time. You can’t put a Nobel laureate in every position, and you can’t pour unlimited dollars into an endless quest to make all your factories and offices more efficient.

The most precious resource is time. The marketplace is in constant motion, and companies must not only move correctly, they must move quickly. Otherwise competitors will fill any available vacuum in the market, resources will get used up, and your organization will inexorably wither away.

Businessintelligences entire raison d’être (that’s French for “shade of lipstick” — just kidding) is as an ally at those inflection points throughout the life of a business where a decision is required. Business intelligence is a flexible resource that can work at various organizational levels and various times — these, for example:

·         A sales manager is deliberating over which prospects the account executives should focus on in the final-quarter profitability push;

·         An automotive firm’s research-and-development team is deciding which features to include in next year’s sedan; and,

·         The fraud department is deciding on changes to customer loyalty programs that will root out fraud without sacrificing customer satisfaction.

The decisions can be strategic or tactical, grand or humble. But they represent two roads diverging in a yellow wood: Considered in the aggregate, the roads taken and those not taken represent the separation between successful and unsuccessful companies. Better decisions, with the help of business intelligence, can make all the difference.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI)

From the CEO down to the lowest levels of any organization, every minute of the day; someone is making a decision that has to have an impact on the company’s performance. Sometimes, a decision is at a very high strategic level that it affects the fate of the entire organization, and other times; a decision might be narrowly defined and tactical, affecting a single person or department for a very short window of time. When taken together, these decisions make up a significant portion of the “day in the life” at any given organization, be it a company, governmental agency, or non-profit organization.

In spite of the dramatic advances in technology and tools that aid in the decision-making process, however, far too many people still make decisions the old-fashioned way: by blending a gumbo of tidbits of current information, best recollections of the past, advice from others, and a whole lot of “gut instinct,” and then assessing which path is likely to give the best possible outcome for the decision at hand.

Decisions drive organizations. Making a good decision at a critical moment may lead to a more efficient operation, a more profitable enterprise, or perhaps a more satisfied customer. So it only makes sense that the companies that make better decisions are more successful in the long run.

That’s where business intelligence comes in.

Business intelligence is defined in various ways. For the moment, though, think of BI as using data about yesterday and today to make better decisions about tomorrow. Whether it’s selecting the right criteria to judge success, locating and transforming the appropriate data to draw conclusions, or arranging information in a manner that best shines a light on the way forward, business intelligence makes companies smarter. It allows managers to see things more clearly, and permits them a glimpse of how things will likely be in the future.