Empowering the decision-makers

Thanks to new tools that adapt to people’s needs, rather than the other way around, the use of business intelligence (BI) is poised to explode in the coming years. In the last decade, most of the focus on BI has centered on data and technology. So it’s probably not surprising that on average, 92 percent of project budgets are devoted to data and technology and most BI product launches are filled with technology acronyms such as ROLAP (relational online analytical processing), FP&B (financial planning and budgeting) and SOA (services oriented architecture).

But data and technology determine only 25 percent of project success. It turns out that process, organisation, culture and leadership are far more important –areas that typically receive only eight percent of the overall investment. In other words, most BI projects vastly underestimate the importance of people and how people interact with information, in project success.

This may help explain why analysts estimate only 15 percent of potential BI users are currently taking advantage of BI. Yet making decisions is an important part of everybody’s job, whether it’s a decision about which customer to deliver to, or which company to purchase.

Everyone is the CEO of their particular domain. Whatever your level, you have some autonomy in terms of how you do your job and some incentives to do it as effectively and efficiently as possible. To succeed, you need to make the right decisions, based on the right information, and you need business intelligence to help you get that information.

Adapt BI for real-world habits
In the past, BI projects provided an extremely high return on investment. Organisations now realise successfully deploying business intelligence to the other 85 percent of potential users will result in huge gains for the future.

Historically, there are many examples of technologies that were successful for many years within niche markets, but didn’t really take off until they were adapted to allow most real-life users to take advantage of them. Two contemporary examples are the RIM Blackberry and the Apple iPod. Neither was the first to market in their field. But they adapted existing technology to fit real-world habits and needs, thus gaining millions of new users around the world.

In order to follow in the footsteps of these technologies, BI needs to get closer to the habits and needs of the average businessperson. Business intelligence is still perceived as a separate task that takes place outside of daily activities, and people are all too often forced to adapt to the way BI tools work, rather than the other way around.

Ease-of-use issues were by far the most important barrier to greater BI deployment. How can you eliminate this barrier? What do people want in real life? How do you want to access the information you need to make your daily decisions? There are four main areas where new innovations are promising breakthrough deployments to the ‘other 85 percent’:

• Providing information the way you want it.
• Including information as part of your daily life.
• Working with real-life data.
• Taking interaction with other people into account.

Information the way you want it
Every decision you make starts with a series of questions. BI tools traditionally provide the answers to these questions in a variety of ways: through reports, queries and charts. But the power of these tools sometimes makes them hard to use for the casual user.

For example, reports are a very efficient way to provide information. Each report can contain a lot of data and the answers to many different questions. Existing, experienced BI users appreciate this. But to get an answer to a specific question you need to sort, filter and interpret the results. These added steps don’t slow down the experts, but they do introduce extra complexity for potential new users.

The latest BI tools let you access information the way you would in real life, with a question-centric interface. This gives you a short answer to a simple question with a single click, with many of the potential choices already made for you. You can quickly and easily make changes to the question, and you’ll be guided to the most probable options. This is a more intuitive, faster and easier way of working for a large number of users. A second big advantage is clarity. Questions and their answers are often clearer and easier to share among different people than reports, which may require more interpretation.

Clearly reports serve a need and will continue to thrive, but if history is any guide, question-centric interfaces may soon become the primary choice for untrained or infrequent users, helping to bring the benefits of BI to a much wider audience.

Information as part of your daily life
Like most people, you probably start your day by listening to your voice mail, checking e-mail and reading the daily headlines via a web portal. BI is generally a separate process, disconnected from all these other ways of getting the important information you need to do your job.

In order to gain wider acceptance, BI needs to be a seamless part of existing workflows and business processes. New BI products are allowing people to access information without having to leave their favorite interfaces, such as Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

Almost every business workflow requires information, analysis and decisions at some point. For example, you may need to determine whether or not to offer a particular customer a special offer during a sales call, or determine the overall risk level when adjusting the company’s portfolio of assets.

In a recent study IDC called this need ‘intelligent process automation’ – applying business intelligence to repeatable operational decisions, where analysis drives response to events.

Businesses have sometimes struggled to include BI as a seamless part of these processes. According to an IDC study, only 14 percent of managers reported feeling very confident with the statement that “the reports and/or alerts developed in my organization deliver relevant information to the right people at the right time”. And as competition increases, there’s pressure to reduce and automate these decision cycles.

In addition, people are increasingly called upon to demonstrate that their business decisions were not arbitrary, but followed established procedures. This requires a defined decision process and the ability to audit the record of decisions.

The latest BI tools support these needs, through the definition of best-practice decision processes, tracking, and auditing.

Working with real-life data
BI deployments often assume the data provided is free of any errors. But in real life, data is often limited, contains errors and omissions, and is out of date or incomparable – and analysis is only as good as the data upon which it is based.

There are two ways to fix this problem. One is to improve the data quality. Analysts predict this will be a key area for BI investments in the coming years. As one popular saying goes, “users want to swear by their numbers, not at them!” Gartner, for example, emphasises the need for ‘data quality firewalls’ which prevent inaccurate information from getting into the BI system in much the same way that a network firewall prevents unauthorised access.

The latest BI tools also help improve data quality through end-to-end monitoring of data flowing through the BI system. This makes it easy to spot quality issues that become visible in reports and dashboards and track them back to the original systems. And conversely, it’s easy to determine the impact of any changes to the base systems on user reports and dashboards.

But even with these improvements, it’s typically impossible to gather perfect data. And if data is technically correct, it can still be misunderstood or misinterpreted. For example, within a typical company, there may be dozens of different calculations used for common business terms such as ‘profit’, ‘headcount’ and ‘margin’.

In the real world, people don’t necessarily want perfect data. They want the ability to see exactly what they’re getting. According to one study, 61 percent of business users say they make decisions based on gut feeling more than 50 percent of the time. Even imperfect data is welcome – as long as users can easily find out where it came from, how it was calculated and when it was last updated.

The latest BI tools make it easy for people to expose this information, rather than leaving them guessing about how reliable the data is. This in turn makes it more likely they will use and share the information with others.

Taking interaction with other people into account
BI often assumes decisions are made by individuals after looking at the information available to them. But in real life, people rarely make important decisions alone – they’re made by consensus or at least after discussion with others.

After all, essential business and market data isn’t always available in corporate systems, so people need to debate about the possible causes of what they are seeing and consult different experts. To arrive at the right answer, most people need to collaborate and combine feedback from different people with access to different systems.

The wider diffusion of dashboards and scorecards over the last few years has helped ensure alignment between different groups about what measures are most important for the business. The latest BI tools build on this foundation by letting people discuss the numbers in dashboards, scorecards, and reports, directly within the BI interface. Message threads let people share the results of their analysis with others. And the information can be archived, acting as an auditable guide to how decisions were made in the past.

For the first time, organisations can implement a collaborative business intelligence program. Rather than accepting that each decision is a separate, one-off occasion, organizations can start developing best-practice guides to optimize the decision making process.

In order to gain more widespread acceptance, BI must continue to adapt to the needs of real-life, everyday users. As much as possible, BI products should let users access information in ways that are familiar and convenient to them, with as little need for training as possible.