The need for business intelligence is greater than ever as enterprises attempt to move their business in the right directions. However, the use of business intelligence does not seem to come with intelligence, as it seems, considering the number of mistakes that are being made out there around BI. Here are just a few:
First, the analysis and use of information that's too operationally focused. These systems are best applied to leveraging decision support information, and thus the ability to abstract patterns from gobs of transactional data. While domain dependent, generally speaking the information analyzed by many BI systems is way too tactical.
Second, the inability to compare recent data points with history. There seems to be two systems in many instances, a BI system that looks at what's going on right now. And, a BI system that looks at what went on in the past. The two are not meeting, and thus the end user is missing out on some valuable information.
Finally, no real time BI capability. Thus, no ability to look at the state of the business as it happens. While these systems are much more expensive, they are invaluable in looking at the state of the business and make the corrections and adjustments ongoing, rather than finding the problem much further down the road.
Nice article. Short and easy to get into. I am a huge fan of connecting BI with BPM - in this case I mean Business Process Management. Note: To me the other BPM - Business Performance Management is one aspect of BI.
When the Business Intelligence system identifies a condition (a trigger) this is where a symbiotic relationship should be in place with a BPM solution to act on that trigger. It can be a single instance, it can be a recursive and iterative condition, it can involve humans or systems of both. The key is that the BI system identified the trigger and the BPM system acted on the trigger. The next step is to insure the systems can continue to identify and flag action items - the use of a ranking system can help here. A well designed system will have a dynamic ranking process that grows and morphs to meet the demands of the business.
The last point was supposed to be:
BI and BPM have been connected for years. The smartest companies are linking their BI, BPM, ECM, and Social Media systems together to create what I call Corporate Authenticity.