Make haste

BI is all about speed: speed of delivery and speed of response - so why does it take so long to actualise BI benefits?

Speed is almost synonymous with BI processes, but traditional BI systems have always shown a slowness of response, and more importantly, taken a long time to show value to the business owner.

Add that to the fact that the nature of business is changing - the business community now works immediately and is free. Response times are always sub-second. The BI market has been commoditised, which means the technology is now generally available and business users are waking up to the fact that access to information leads to agility and success. So more people want the data, in less time than ever before. How can all of these evolved needs be satisfied?

The traditional way of doing BI has to change.

Quick BI will begin to show business value in as little as three months, all the while laying a solid foundation for a long-term BI strategy, a perfect balance for any successful BI deployment.

There are three value cycles in BI. The most popular one in BI is the old Excel approach of 'build many, use once', which allows for quick delivery in days, but this is of no benefit to the organisation in the long-term. Often companies that claim to offer “next generation of BI” use this method - they try to solve a problem fast, but this is rarely sustainable.

With the Excel approach, users are building many, many sandcastles and then the tide comes in and washes them away. The key is to start building a solid foundation from square one.

The traditional way of doing BI has to change.

Keith Jones is MD of Avisen.

The second approach, 'build many, use many', is better aimed in the right direction for securing solid BI foundations, but the Holy Grail is the approach of 'build once, use many'. The latter is the concept that quick BI ascribes to. Quick BI delivers quickly and the trade-off is that users are building a house with solid foundations, and not frail sandcastles.

The Business Survey's Business Benefits Index cites three months as being the ideal timeframe for showing value to clients. If a client can see benefits within three months, they will engage - and stay engaged.

With traditional BI, it often takes about a year before real benefits can be seen. Companies offering traditional BI focus too much on the planning process, which can easily take nine months and cost a million rand.

Quick BI is about putting your money where your mouth is, and delivering quick value for money. The sooner the journey is started, the sooner the first revelation. Long planning cycles will reveal nothing.

So how does it work? In brief, quick BI focuses on two components - namely, repeatable intellectual property (IP), and shortened time to delivery. Repeatable IP takes an organisation's IP, one of the most valuable corporate assets, and makes it re-usable. Once original IP has been created and used, it is made available to the rest of the organisation for easy and consistent access, and subsequent re-use and enhancement. The best way for this to happen is through making existing reports, their objects and business templates as re-usable components available across the business and even across businesses. These can be relatively granular, such as grids or icons, or as high-level as existing reports and full-blown templates. Re-use has always been one of the goals of object-oriented technology, and such an approach delivers re-use as an inherent design philosophy.

Furthermore, allowing users to design their own reports with existing IP accelerates delivery, and reduces the burden on IT to design reports and run queries. It helps do away with the frustration that often characterises the user experience, and it cuts costs. The same logic can be applied to business or technical templates. Users often are not sure what they want and many practices are common across businesses such as finance, sales, HR. These templates can be generic or detailed industry-specific solutions.

The successful combination of repeatable IP and rapid delivery can collapse the BI deployment cycles to months if not weeks, and the returns can be immediate and significant. Not only will a higher degree of user acceptance be ensured, but so will a heightened and faster return on investment.