Johannesburg, 15 Jun 2009
Business intelligence (BI) has reached a stage of semi-maturity in many organisations - demonstrated by the fact that the BI competency centre is staffed and managed - although not fully.
Additionally, even though the structure and quality of the data warehouse's content should be regarded with some suspicion, a plethora of reports and dashboards are being dispersed throughout the organisation, and in some cases, we even have certified power-users who can develop their own reports, and in so doing, spread more information throughout the organisation.
However, the “stare and compare” method of analysing this information is not good enough anymore, especially not if the organisation's executive dashboard has “matured” into a report pack consisting of 326 measures spread over 20 pages. Comparing this month's columns of data to last month's, and even to the corresponding targets, it is error-prone and labour intensive and, to be honest, downright boring. Enter role-based BI (RBI).
RBI sits on top of the business process, offering an analysis of the process data over time, comparing it to best practices and other standards that have been established. It notifies the appropriate individuals about any variance in time for them to be able to make adjustments to correct the problem. This is different from business process workflow alerts, which provide information about specific events as they happen. Workflow alerts tell you where you are. Variance alerts tell you ahead of time that you're not going to be where you want to be unless something is fixed.
RBI acknowledges the fact that different people are responsible for different roles and activities within an organisation, and as such, need to look at information in different ways and at different times. Despite all the dissimilar perspectives and points of view that exist, each must align with one another and ultimately with the company's strategic objectives and targets.
With RBI, the right information is automatically pushed out to the right people at the right time, based on the work they are doing. It's more than simple notification; it's an awareness of the subject area packaged with important context when they need it. By using RBI, combined with visual reporting, a manager is automatically notified of significant changes, and he/she can focus on the areas that need attention. He/she can even drive meetings from the application, and drill down on the detail of problem cases where necessary. Best is, he/she does not have to wait for the meeting or the report pack to be delivered - but rather receives it as the situation unfolds.
Building some advanced analytics into the application can take it that one step further - an alert can be sent to a mobile device when a particular process veers more than a pre-defined threshold off the best-practice track. The model can predict the outcome and notify the manager accordingly, should he/she not intervene. It all boils down to a little bit of information exactly when it's needed.
According to Gartner*, the optimal number of metrics for each role is five to nine - the hard part is choosing the right five to nine - to ensure all tie together consistently as one drills up and down the hierarchies. This requires the data behind the application to be up-to-date and correctly structured and to be of a very high quality.
All of this demonstrates a strong case for RBI, which is the key to unlocking sustainable execution of an organisation's strategy, by delivering more realistic and fact-based business models. It is therefore important that we move beyond the stage of semi-maturity to maturity to ensure the competence is fully staffed and managed and that the content of the data warehouse moves beyond suspicious data - to become business driving information.
* Business Value of IT - Non-financial Measurements, Gartner, 2008
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