Business intelligence (BI) has become a kind of Holy Grail in the IT industry. This is hardly surprising given the kind of benefits it offers a business that successfully implements it.
Real-time analysis of a company's sales and supply-chain data, financial performance and other indicators gives it a competitive edge in a globally competitive world.
WHAT IT MEANS
 Solutions are mature and easier
Involvement of all staff is encouraged
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Though the industry has been banging the BI drum for years, and solutions are more mature and easier to implement, there are still pitfalls. Most of these are related to transforming the way the company operates, and requires change management as much as a software application installation.
Indeed, the staff who use it will require training and the BI tools should be opened up not just to senior management but to the rest of the company too. Notwithstanding the changes it will have on a business, and should have, many executives are wary of these factors and their associated costs.
But one needs to see the bigger picture of a business's functioning, and to see it in real time. This need hasn't escaped the attention of the world's biggest software maker, Microsoft.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says the company is focused on creating software that addresses specific businesses priorities, including business intelligence. "Powerful yet intuitive software that supports advanced visualisation and modelling of information will be used every day by information workers to find meaningful patterns in the vast sea of data they collect. This software will also help employees use the insight they gain to trigger processes that enable organisations to respond quickly as business conditions change," he says.
Cognos SA MD David McWilliam says: "Real-time BI can give a company the edge by providing a faster decision-making process and improved forecasting. However, it is important to implement real-time BI in the right context and with the right infrastructure to support the technology."
In short, business intelligence is "the ability to report on live information from many systems rather than single batches' of information. This need arose from the requirement for real-time information in certain areas of an organisation that are mission-critical and is reflected in operational reports and dashboards that require up-to-the-second information," says McWilliam.
"Take financial institutions. Most of these organisations make use of real-time dashboards to establish if there is a problem within the infrastructure, such as a branch office. The dashboard will draw immediate attention to the issue to quickly minimise negative effects."
Carel Badenhorst, BI product manager at SAS Institute SA, concurs. It will enable businesses "to use large amounts of data to make intelligent decisions based on analytical and statistical accuracy rather than gut feel," he says. "It will enable them to not only gain an insight into what happened in the business past, but give an accurate view of what is happening in the business present, and is likely to happen in the business future.
"The biggest potential for pitfalls is the lack of recognition of BI necessity by both business and IT sponsors, and the sponsorship not being driven at a high-enough level. "However, if this is in place all the other potential pitfalls - such as budget and resources - seem to fall away like mist before the noonday sun."
When implementing a solution, he advises, a business should consider a few things: "Take a step back and ask yourself what you want to achieve with business intelligence. Is it your intention to try to implement a query and reporting tool that will provide you with some pretty reports on historical information? Or are you trying to implement an enterprise solution that is going to provide accurate guidance as well as sound statistical and analytical backup for the key strategic business decisions facing you on a daily basis."
