Business Intelligence Focus

The goal of business intelligence is better decisions. Managers, customer service representatives, salespeople, workers on the manufacturing lines – employees in all areas of a company – make better decisions when they make them on the basis of facts. Decisions often have to be made quickly and then acted upon. If key information is not available at the moment a decision has to be made, the decision maker will have to rely on instinct and incomplete information. The opportunity for a better decision is wasted.

Enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and other systems manage the data created by business processes. These systems usually include some “canned” reports that may provide up-to-the-minute data. Information technology specialists can customize these reports. A limited number of business users may be granted the right to download or export data from these reports. These users then use tools such as Microsoft Excel to massage the data and combine it with data from other sources.

This is perhaps the most common data strategy in mid-sized companies. This approach – of running operational reports directly against a source system – has the advantage of providing up-to-the-minute data for the business processes managed by that source system. However, it also has many disadvantages. Some of the most important disadvantages are data gaps and report performance.

Data gaps exist because most companies have multiple systems each of which manages different business processes. For analyses that require data from multiple source systems, business users often spend more time rationalizing or integrating data than they do analyzing it. Because these integrations are often one-off efforts performed by different people using different approaches, results are inconsistent and sometimes contradictory.

Report performance is often an issue with this data strategy because source systems and databases are optimized for processing transactions rather than reports. Long-running reports often impact the response time of the entire system and the productivity of other users. Many companies restrict such reports from running during business hours.

We can use our in-depth knowledge and experience with business intelligence methods, techniques, and best practices to help you plan your data strategy. We can evaluate your existing data strategy and create a roadmap to a reliable, efficient, maintainable data architecture that delivers consistent, timely data to your reporting and analytic applications.