Asking intelligent business questions
You can have all the data in the world, but if you don’t know what reports to ask for and how to ask for them it is worthless. Companies are likely to spend $2.5bn globally on Business Intelligence software this year, but the lack of skilled IT professionals could hold up its effectiveness
Business Intelligence is all about asking the right questions. The last few years have seen a massive effort by most organisations to try to organise their information through enterprise software, but unless they can drive the data they have collected to give them meaningful and useful reports it is pretty much wasted effort. Where customers are spending their money, and on what is useful information that can make the difference to the success and failure of a business.
Companies that do BI well are generally very successful – look at Tesco and Wal-mart - and last year a raft of the leading BI suppliers all launched integrated BI tools and product sets, which means that ought to be easier to achieve. But there is a problem. The global BI market is likely to grow over seven per cent a year for the next four years, according to analysts, but there will be a shortage of skilled people to keep up with this growth.
Gartner’s annual CIO survey found that BI was the number one technology priority among heads of IT for 2006, and the analyst company has said that forward thinking organisations are looking to BI as a driver for business innovation and growth. CIOs plan to increase their BI budgets by 4.8 per cent this year.
Last year, expert BI vendors like Business Objects, Hyperion and Cognos all launched tools that make it possible to carry out quick reports on all business activities and transactions. But in spite of this, Gartner has warned that limited BI skills and competencies could hamper firms in effectively using the tools to distil the vast amounts of data they now own.
“BI is now part of an organisation's license to operate, as every enterprise needs to manage information," said Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president, Gartner, at the analyst’s annual BI Summit in London. "However, BI has not yet achieved the necessary level of strategic importance and is not included as an essential part of corporate planning activities. Moving forward, BI will become part of business innovation itself. Sharing information with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders increases loyalty and in many industries provides competitive differentiation. BI will become pervasive in operational and workplace applications as organisations seek to optimise their business.”
The recent trend has been for organisations to consolidate and standardise their applications and infrastructures, and this is a real advantage in effective BI. Retrieving data from 100s of different applications has been difficult and costly, but standardisation could ease this path. Obviously young organisations like the Internet players have a major advantage here. But the important action is to get the right skills in place, and then incorporate BI in strategic planning and business transformation.
“There are certainly no quick fixes where BI is concerned. There are multiple decisions and choices that need to be made on the road to making BI effective and pervasive in any organisation,” said Buytendijk. “These decisions cannot be made in isolation and must be considered within the wider context of the business. One of the key decisions is to move beyond a BI vision that focuses almost exclusively on information dissemination and start integrating BI into an organisation's strategic planning activities."
Gartner suggests that organisations:
- Develop user skills and a culture in the use and analysis of information to be an integral part of achieving business objectives
- Change the way BI is integrated into business processes
- Change the way the information architecture and application portfolio are implemented and managed
Some BI vendors have already responded to the potential skills shortage by getting together with training organisations and colleges to design BI specific courses. Cognos has said it may launch a training scheme designed to increase the number of skilled IT professionals able to understand the principals of building and managing a data warehouse. But really successful BI needs a two pronged approach. Firstly highly skilled IT professionals who really understand the mechanics of the technologies, and secondly highly skilled business professionals who know what questions to ask of their data.
