It's time to rethink BI - Moving from Business Intelligence to Business Insights

[#1]

What’s in a name? From Business Intelligence to Business Insights.

BI needs a new name. It’s not enough that business users have access to intelligence – what they really need is insights. And that is the premise of this blog.

Semantics, some might say. Not really.

Somewhere in the past decade, the CIO broke into the inner clique of C-level executives with the promise that IT holds the key to delivering timely and actionable information to the other lines of business (LOBs). A decade and many millions - perhaps billions - of dollars later the plain truth is that most CIOs have not entirely delivered on that promise.

CEOs and LOB leaders continue to rant about the lack of relevant data for their decision makers while CIOs struggle with just keeping the lights running in the data center and playing whack-a-mole with a constant stream of BI requests.

The solution lies in getting them to align on a single goal: to deliver business insights, not just business intelligence. CEOs and LOB leaders need to empower their CIOs further and help create what some call a “data oriented culture” in the enterprise. CIOs needs to rethink the way they leverage existing information systems and how they could consolidate new gold mines of information to deliver nuggets that would make business users ecstatic.

It’s time to Rethink BI. Can your current BI systems pass this five point check?

BI systems that truly deliver outstanding results to the business share five characteristics. If your BI system doesn't make the cut, maybe it's time to rethink BI.

      i. Agile: Does your BI infrastructure support ad hoc (as opposed to canned) queries without degrading overall system performance? Does it offer real time or right time insights consistently and securely?

    ii. Smart: Does your system just tell business users what happened or what they can do about it? Can it learn from past events? Does it cross-pollinate data across business unit boundaries?

   iii. Consumable: Is the information easy to consume? Are there visualizations available for complex data? Can business users self serve data or do they need to go through IT for each new request?

  iv. Predictive: Can your BI infrastructure develop predictive models so business users can anticipate shocks and formulate processes to be proactive when such events occur?

    v. Comprehensive: Does your BI system represent a single version of the truth? Have you optimized the system end to end – from the data center to the application – for low cost, high performance and maximum utilization?

Come back soon. What’s it in for you?

This is the first of many blog posts on a variety of topics on BI. Most of our posts will likely fall under one of three themes:

• Thought Leadership: What are the key BI trends? How do you separate signal from noise? What are the 20% buying considerations that will influence 80% of your business results? Who are the key thought leaders and influencers in this space and how can we recognize them for the time and effort they put into empowering the rest of us?
• Impact: Success stories of customers trying to solve many of the same problems as you. How did they overcome technological and political challenges? How are customers integrating the new with the old in their information systems?
• Innovation: What are some successful use cases around burgeoning technologies that support BI such as Hadoop and in-memory analytics? What are the new solutions recently announced or over the horizon that could help you foster innovation and a data-oriented culture in your company?

Please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed. Of course, we would love to get your feedback and requests for new content. Thanks for your interest and we hope to see you back soon. If you plan on attending HP Discover in three weeks, drop us a note below and we’d love to connect. If you haven’t made plans yet, it’s not too late to register – don’t miss out on a great chance to watch Sheryl Crow and Don Henley in concert, and get a sneak preview of the new 3-D Madagascar movie!

[#2]

How about the move from business insight to business action -- Isn't that what the business is really looking for?

[#3]

Spot on, Charlie!

CEOs want to be able to leverage BI not just to look in the rear view mirror (i.e. reports and dashboards) but also to understand how to navigate the road ahead. BI systems need to prompt business actions by intelligently gathering and processing data from across the enterprise and using predictive analytics to offer a peek into the future.

However, to make that demand of IT, business leaders need to first break down silos and build a data bus across the enterprise to facilitate intelligent cross-pollination (all part of creating a data oriented culture). Many customers tell us that the political challenges of building agile, smart and predictive BI systems are far greater than the technological ones. The most successful BI implementations are those where business and IT agree on corporate policies around the lifecycle of data and its usage, and continue to evolve those policies to accomodate new trends such as the consumerization of IT and the growth of unstructured data.

[#4]

No matter what you call them  , action is what is needed in a business. AS  how great are your insights and intelligence about it, if  you're not making it happen it would be  useless.

Jessica Miller

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