So far, I have looked at the definitions of the business intelligence (BI) market and the external drivers that influence it. In this Industry Insight, I will look at business logic, which many IT staff believe is an oxymoron, after engaging in discussions with users.
"All I want to know is what you want, how difficult should that be?" Well, ask my wife, it is not a simple discussion. Nothing is as it seems.
BI will become faster, without sacrificing quality or sustainability.
Components will reside in template libraries for re-use. The business will see a single interface, and the distinctions between reporting, dashboarding and analytics will disappear. The barriers between inside the firewall and outside the firewall will go and the economic value chain will be included in the solution.
Multi-tool solution
It's all about taking the data and meeting the needs of the business with this data. No single vendor will be able to meet the needs of all the business users for a large corporate, in spite of what the brochure says. This may not be the case for the mid or lower market, and one good tool and Excel will often do the job.
So, the larger companies need to be prepared for a multi-tool solution, now and for the foreseeable future. As the platform vendors offerings mature, the business needs will be doing so at a slightly faster pace, so there will always be a need for specialist products. The larger players' software release cycles are just too long to be able to play convincingly in this sector.
The focus in the future business-driven market will move very much away from the tools and platforms, and will move to what can actually be done with the data. How can real business value and real business benefits be obtained?
The focus will not be on the data, but what is actually done with it.
The assumption will be, the data can be retrieved and a report/dashboard or KPI can be produced, but then what? Does the information offer real value?
There are two sets of value: what the data says and what is actually done with the data. The first part can be met with providing pre-packaged business templates and 'information packs', or industry templates that help identify what to look at.
Information needs to be acted on to have any value. If the information is not used, in spite of what it may be saying, it actually has no value. It's analogous to the question of the falling tree in the forest that no one sees.
Value in action
The value in the data is created by the resulting action and not by the data itself. The action should lead to a bottom line impact, which means the results should be seen on the income statement or balance sheet at some point. So, the first part will be met by providing quick-start templates, although, to be honest, there is still a lot of scepticism around the value these offer. They need to improve a great deal before they are taken seriously.
Information needs to be acted on to have any value.
Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones.
The second part will be the focus of the future market, and closing the feedback loop will be the big hype. Information turned to action and then the result of the action measured, although this is still a while away. What can be done now and what will offer enormous value will be management by exception.
Everyone is talking about the data explosion, increased access to information and analysis paralysis.
The market of the short-term future will be exception-driven. Build a report, decide the tolerances for the content and then never look at the report again, but be notified every time one of the defined tolerance levels is breached. Most reports tell companies what they know, so why look at them?
The way forward is to tell the company what is not known.
The last business driver will be benchmarking. How is the company doing in the market? All markets are relative, and to do well, all that has to be done is to outperform most of the competitors. This could be construed as CI or competitive intelligence, but rather than be accused of being a jargonistic hype artist, I will stick to good old operational benchmarking.
* Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones.
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