Sharing intelligence with your systems

Joe McKendrick had an interesting post yesterday over on the BI in Action blog - To 'Compete on Analytics,' Intelligence Has to be Shared. I reviewed the book to which he refers, Tom Davenport's Competing on Analytics on my other blog a little while back (here) and think that decision automation offers another way to "share" intelligence - only with your systems, not just with your people. At one point in this post Joe says:

"Add to this the fact that most end-users do not have access to the latest BI tools, and still have to go through IT or other departments. "

Now the question I would ask is do you, in fact, want most end-users to have access to the latest BI tools? Do your bank tellers, retail clerks, truck drivers, greeters or even call center representatives need or want business intelligence tools as they are currently defined? Could they use them if they had them? Is their turnover low enough to justify training them? Joe went on to point out that

"Overall, the survey found, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to BI and corporate performance management tools"

That does sound too-low to me but still I think that the solution is not to give everyone BI or performance management tools but to make the systems with which they work smarter and better informed. BI tools alone, even if widely deployed, will not "work at the speed of frontline decision-makers". If I have seconds to make a decision, I need a system that is focused on that decision. After all, those who know first don't win, those who act first do! In addition, performance management is more than performance monitoring. Most corporate performance management tools are really just good for monitoring. You need to be able to change the way you (or your systems) decide in response to your monitoring before it can be considered management. As my co-author Neil Raden said in a great piece over on Intelligent Enterprise about BI 2.0 :

Rethink analytics - Informing people to make better decisions is out; changing the nature of work is in

In the interests of fair disclosure, Joe wrote a very nice testimonial (here) for the book Neil and I recently completed on this topic, Smart (Enough) Systems.

Technorati Tags: analytics, BI, business intelligence, competing on analytics, decision automation, decision management, Neil Raden, predictive analytics, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems, performance management, Tom Davenport