Johannesburg, 02 May 2013
It is 2013 and we accumulate more data than ever, with a third of the global population engaging with this digital landfill. Between 2010 and 2015, mobile data traffic is estimated to increase 26 times over. This general availability of the Internet and access to information is indicative of one thing, the customer has a voice.
Add to this the current economic climate, where enterprises, big and small, are trying to cut cost and add to their bottom line. Enterprises will once again look at business intelligence (BI) to get them closer to their customers. The importance of BI for business executives around the globe is reflected by Gartner research firm in its article: "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013".
BI is often used to refer to every component involved in establishing a decision support system, and will be used as such in the rest of the article to refer to the collective value offering.
BI enjoyed its fair share of attention over recent years, and with the pressure mounting on businesses to improve on customer experience, this is not likely to change.
The question, therefore, is will BI be able to deliver on the promises of yesterday?
Before we try to answer that question, maybe we should consider why BI projects have failed in the first place. It is generally accepted that failure to deliver value to customers can be contributed to three challenges:
1. Data
Insight from BI should always lead to action and our approach to resolving the data quality issue shouldn't be any different. To facilitate change in this respect, key stakeholders should be held accountable to improve the quality of data.
These stakeholders should have the required authority to not only ensure that data is cleansed, but also to initiate change to the responsible processes in order to ensure that history don't repeat itself.
2. Time to value
Enterprises realise their window of opportunity keeps getting smaller because customers are not as loyal to a specific brand as they used to be, which demands a greater sense of urgency from BI.
This realisation manifested in Gartner's latest "Leaders' Quadrant for BI", with a fair representation of presumably smaller BI vendors.
These smaller rivals position themselves as an intuitive alternative, which enable business users to do their own ad hoc analysis without much involvement from IT. For the same reason, Excel was and still is widely adopted and used as a reporting and analysis tool.
Although the scalability of some vendors might be questionable, it does serve to accentuate the following points:
* BI budgets are in the hand of business.
* Business is looking for answers with or without the involvement of IT.
Therefore, whether BI service providers consider methodology, architecture or vendor, time can be a friend or foe.
3. Executive sponsorship
I was recently asked by our CEO how we can differentiate ourselves as a BI service provider, and I believe the key to success for BI is in the relationships we nurture.
There has always been a disconnect between business and IT in general, leading to the 'us and them' culture. Unfortunately for some BI service providers, value is determined by the business and not the tool or any other component some BI service providers rely on so heavily.
No one will argue the fact that business has a role to play in BI projects, but traditionally, contributions have been limited where businesses were more likely to consume than to contribute.
The importance of executive sponsorship is underlined by various experts in the industry, including household names like Ralph Kimball, Oracle and Gartner.
Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) is only one way to deal with this challenge, but will also be a great aid in addressing the challenges outlined above.
According to Wikipedia, BICC can be defined as follows:
"A Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) is a cross-functional organisational team that has defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for supporting and promoting the effective use of business intelligence (BI) across an organisation."
This governing body with representatives from IT and business (including the executive sponsor from business) will ensure that the efforts from BI align with business strategy. BICC will also ensure resources are not wasted on ad hoc tasks, and that BI has the mandate and focus to execute on the blueprint.
Conclusion
In the past, BI projects struggled to get to grips with structured data, adding to the challenge that companies are now looking into unlocking the potential associated with unstructured data - the challenge presented to BI service providers is massive.
There is a lot of hype around appliances, cloud computing, big data, consolidation and some BI vendors manage to tick all the right boxes, but if we wish to provide business with an enterprise-wide, robust and scalable solution, BI service providers need support of business at the highest level.
Data might be the new oil, but it is the partnership between business and IT that will optimise return on investment for BI and turn data into an asset.
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