Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of gathering information in the field of business. It can be described as the process of enhancing data into information and then into knowledge. Business intelligence is carried out to gain sustainable competitive advantage, and is a valuable core competence in some instances.
Information is typically obtained about customer needs, customer decision making processes, the competition and competitive pressures, conditions in the industry, and general economic, technological, and cultural trends. Every business intelligence system has a specific goal, which is derived from an organisational goal or from the vision statement. Goals could be short term (e.g.: quarterly numbers to Wall Street) or long term (shareholder value, target industry share / size etc).
Industrial espionage is a type of business intelligence that uses covert techniques. There is a gray area between "normal" business intelligence and industrial espionage.
Business performance management is a software oriented business intelligence system that some see as the new generation of business intelligence though the terms are used interchangeably by most in the industry.
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History
The first probable reference to Business intelligence is made in Sun Tzu's "Art of War" where he claims that to succeed in war, you should have full knowledge of your strengths/weaknesses and full knowledge of your enemy's strengths/weaknesses. Lack of either one might result in defeat. Modern business is no different from warfare. BI is the art of wading through tons of data overload, sieving through data and presenting information - both internal (from operational systems) and external (market intelligence) - on which management can act or build strategies.
Metrics /Key Performance Indicators
BI uses Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to assess the present state of business and to prescribe a course of action. More and more organizations are moving toward faster availability of data. In the past, data was available only after a month or two, which wouldn't help you adjust in time to hit Wall Street targets. Recently, banks have tried make data available at shorter intervals and have reduced delays. For example, for businesses which have higher operational/credit risk loading (e.g., credit cards and wealth management), Citibank makes KPI-related data available weekly, and sometimes offers a daily analysis of numbers. This means data is usually available within 24 hours, necessitating automation and the use of IT systems.
What are metrics and KPIs? How do I get started?
To verify the design of the initial system, we could ask the following questions of every strategic initiative:
Goal Alignment queries:
- What is the strategic goal of the organization that is being addressed by this particular activity?
- What organizational mission/vision does it relate to?
- Do we have a hypothesis as to how this initiative will eventually improve results / performance (i.e. a strategy map)?
- What is the existing level of performance? Do we know or have the capability to know (monitoring capability)?
- Are we collecting this data and storing it somewhere?
- What are the statistical parameters of this data, e.g. how much random variation does it contain? Are we measuring this?
- What is the existing cost of present operations?
- How much will that increase when we go ahead with the initiative?
- What is the risk that this cost will be exceeded or achieved? Have we performed a similar sensitivity analysis on this?
- Is the money being spent on this present initiative the best use of the funds, or is there a better alternative usage?
- What is the risk that the initiative will fail? Has this assessment been included in the planning?
- Have you listed all the communities of interest that have a stake in this present initiative?
- Who are the kinds of customers/stakeholders who will benefit directly from this initiative? Who will benefit indirectly? What are the quantitative / qualitative benefits?
- Is the specified initiative the best way to increase satisfaction for all kinds of customers, or is there a better way?
- How will we know that the initiative benefits these customers?
- What metrics will be used to define the benefit?
- Are these the best metrics? How do we know that?
- How many metrics need to be tracked? If this is a large number (it usually is), what kind of system are you planning to use to track them?
- Are the metrics standardized, so they can be benchmarked against performance in other organizations? What are the industry standard metrics available?
- How will the metrics be measured? What methods will be used, and how frequently will data be collected? Are there any industry standards for this?
- Is this the best way to do the measurements? How do we know that?
- How can we demonstrate that this strategic initiative, and not something else, contributed to a change in results?
- How much of the change was probably random?
Tools for business intelligence
People doing business intelligence have developed tools that ease the work, especially when the intelligence task involves gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. These are some tools commonly used for business intelligence:
- OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) sometimes simply called Analytics (based on dimensional analysis and the hypercube or 'cube')
- Scorecarding, dashboarding and data visualization
- Data Modelling and tools for defining Business Logic Layers and Business Rules
- Report Servers
- Data warehouses
- Data mining
- Business workflow analysis
- Business performance management
- Business management systems p2p
- Document warehouses
- Text mining
Companies providing BI software / Project implementation
- Altius Consulting[1]
- Appian Corporation
- Business Objects
- Business-Soft
- BraveSoftTech
- Capgemini
- Cartesis
- Cognos
- Collective Intelligence
- Comshare
- Cyberscience
- Hyperion Solutions now owns Brio software
- Inforay
- Information Builders WebFOCUS and iWay Software
- Information Management Group Ltd
- Inforte
- Microsoft
- MicroStrategy
- Oberon-bwa
- OutlookSoft
- ProClarity
- QlikTech
- Siebel Systems
- SAS Institute
- Saksoft
- Synola Ltd
See also
- List of management topics
- Industry or market research
- Industrial espionage
- Environmental scanning
- Marketing research
- Reverse engineering
- Competitive intelligence
- Competitor analysis
External links
- Business Intelligence Guide
- Business Intelligence Software from Siebel
- IntelliBusiness.com
- Business Intelligence Network
- DM Review
- Business Intelligence Software Introduction Website
- Brand Your Consulting Brilliance
- Information Management Group Ltd
- Kmining List of business intelligence, data mining and KDD scientific conferences
- SearchCRM.com Original daily news, white papers, expert advice, webcasts and other resources on business intelligence.
- SAKSOFT A leading BI/BPM company in the Financial Services Domain