One definition of "B.I." is the ability to extract relevant business/management information from existing (database) systems, but beyond the mechanical details B.I. is really about uncovering the relationships between different aspects of your company so that you can encourage the company toward specific goals, such as increasing market share and improving customer satisfaction.
Too much data, not enough information
The driving force behind B.I. is that companies, even smaller ones, are drowning in unrelated facts hidden in their various administration systems:- payroll data, financial data, customer data, vendor data, and so on. On the surface the data may seem unrelated, but in fact everything in the business is related somehow, but you need to be able to view it as a whole before you start to see how those relations are working. By pulling all that data together and correlating it into useful management information Business Intelligence provides the “B.I.g picture”, that higher level of tactical and strategic information needed to make well founded decisions and predictions based on the available company data sources.
And - if some data is truly unrelated, then why is it in the business in the first place?
B.I. doesn’t generate new data—it simply makes it easier to explore overlooked relationships between data. That may lead to unexpected discoveries.
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“Where do we see the B.I.ggest failure rate for “Model X”? Is that linked to who does the maintenance? No, it’s not that. Lets look at the locations – does that give us a clue? Ah, I can see that all the worst performing ones are in damp environments.” |
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The combination of good (B.I. generated) insight into data and intimate knowledge of the business is a big enabler.
If you can’t look at your data and its relationships as above – maybe with a bit of typical “SME" (or Departmental) management intuition, you may spend a long time never really tracking down a problem, or perhaps never even seeing that a problem exists in the first place.
B.I. Goals
The main goal for B.I., then, is to provide a way of getting to the big picture:-
- The ability to view data from multiple sources in a single view, such as seeing sales information correlated with shipping expenses and facility utility bills
- The ability to quickly see summaries of data from different places—such as the total payroll spent, along with the total sales, for a given time period
- The ability to see data over time, comparing data from yesterday, last month, the last three quarters of each of the past 5 years, to see how things have changed over time
- The ability to ask “what if” questions and have answers generated based on historical data; for example, you might want to know if raising sales by 10% for a sustained period of time will necessitate a raise in utility costs or payroll expenses
What is Business Intelligence, What is it for?