Month: May 2017
INVESTING In BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business intelligence is a field that is highly important for organizations across all industries. Over the past thirty days I had the opportunity to embark on an intense course of study with positive results. Let’s get started, although technology is transforming business activities, business intelligence technology is causing great consternation with the top level executives, reporting from the business community. I have discovered that, business intelligence platforms must be evaluated by looking at the positive and negative aspects before making the decision to invest in a solution.
It is a major requirement for each champion, within the organization, to be responsible for conducting a SWOT analysis to determine the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat for each BI vendor. This step is necessary, because there is no one-size-fits-all tool available on the market. The business intelligence tool user is responsible for locating the appropriate platform which produces a positive cash flow for the company. The objective is to locate, through a selection process, the proper tool for the BI project. Generally speaking, failure to integrate business requirements into the selection process can result in project failure.
Although the there are many business intelligence platforms available, the success of BI depends to a considerable extent on the data available in the organization. Indeed, data quality is considered to be the most important technical factor. Therefore, the information contained in reports from a BI solution is directly related to the available data which is provided by the enterprise. Furthermore, the organization’s data, including the data being provided by the transactional systems, and the data that resides in the data warehouse, should be of the highest quality. In effort to clearly point out the need for clean data, an organization should consider several aspects of data quality, including: relevance, accuracy, consistency, and or course, whether the organization has the data.
With all things considered, the buyer should know the capabilities of the solution being provided by the vendor. Such as, the information delivery in the form of reporting, dashboards, Ad Hoc Query, and Microsoft Office integration. The platform of choice should include: BI infrastructure integration, metadata management, development tools, workflow and collaboration capability, and support for the business process, execution language. On the other hand, the solution would be useless without analysis capability, in the form of OLAP, visualizations, predictive modeling, data mining, and scorecard presentation. The overall concern for the enterprise, is to find a vendor with the perfect solution which produces a high ROI.
In conclusion, it has been found that the best practice is to follow the Kimball University guidelines, and the Gartner Magic Quadrant before investing time and resources in a vendor. But, who will rate the champion who is going to lead the project to success? The enterprise executive must choose the leader of the project with great care, because the champion is responsible for ensuring the success of the BI project. Till next time, keep your KPI’s in mind and invest intelligently.
436 MEDIA INC.
ED MacAudio 