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What are the top 3 things potential buyers should know about business intelligence?
If you had 30 seconds to explain the benefits of business intelligence to a potential buyer, what are the top 3 points that you would make??
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9 Answers
There are some great responses here. I would also add:
1. You can start small and grow. New, agile approaches to BI mean that you can quickly get some reports and dashboards (for example, on sales data only), and then expand to more data sources, users, or projects. Don't worry about having a Big Bang. Just get started - it will prove itself quickly.
2. IT can be the conductor, and doesn't have to be the whole orchestra anymore. In the past, BI placed a huge burden on the IT team, to set up, update, and administer the solution. This meant that IT quickly got overwhelmed, and business was constantly pestering IT for new reports. Modern BI is easier to use by business users, so IT can just help with set up, and then let business users create their own reports. If you use SaaS BI, IT doesn't even have to deal with update hassles anymore, either, so they can focus on higher level issues and get rid of their reporting backlog.
3. BI becomes a positive force, beyond hard ROI. Having reporting and analysis available broadly throughout an organization clarifies goals, makes progress more obvious, and accelerates decisionmaking. This means that you can see improvement not only in key performance indicators, like revenue and operating costs, but in intangible benefits, like faster, more effective meetings.
For the sake of full disclosure, I work for the SaaS BI company Birst (www.birst.com).
Today’s extraordinary powerful Business Intelligence technology has the potential to transform raw data into relevant, accurate and useable strategic knowledge to support the sustainable profitability of any company.
However, according to Gartner Research, 80% of BI implementations fail and six different studies confirm that about only 5% of employees use BI effectively. It’s not uncommon to see after technically successful deployments of state of the art Business Intelligence software that folks in strategic areas of the company still struggle to make sense of the data to grow the business.
These are my top three actions to overcome these issues:
1) Data Quality: BI is not magic, data quality is fundamental. In order to work, the data needs to be cleansed, organized and structured BEFORE it enters the BI software to provide strategic meaning and direction.
2) Business-Intuitive Design: Building unnecessary complexities in data marts and analytic objects may not be an impediment to IT or expert analysts but it causes business users frustration that translates into underutilization or avoidance of difficult systems they don’t understand. Knowledgeable business partners need to be involved during the BI design and pilot face, but the partnership does not stop there. BI needs to be very dynamic constantly adapting and accurately reflecting the changing business reality.
3) Top Management Support: Executives need to fully commit to the project, and once implemented should demand that the organization continues to use the BI solution to understand the root causes of both issues and opportunities. In addition people should be able to easily measure their Balanced Score Card progress against strategic KPIs provided by the BI solution and not manually calculated in spreadsheets. Both support and enforcement are important because they strengthen the data-driven culture ensuring that BI does not become the flavor of the month.
Many companies do not realize that they can use Business Intelligence beyond the back office tactical day-to-day operation. They are missing the opportunity to use BI as a strategic tool to understand trends better than the competition and increase market share, revenue and profit.
Regards, Bill
http://strat-wise.com
1. BI is not only the technology. Successful BI implementations are the combination of the BI app + the business process being addressed.
2. BI can be applied to every business or group of the organization (front, middle or back office areas). The main point here is that there is always potential to grow and add more/continuous value to the organization.
3. Even though the ROI of BI can always be measure by quantitative results, there are also some soft benefits (indirect or intangible) that need to be considered when buying and implementing a BI solution.
1)Of course, BI is for business people, not IT.
2)BI implementations are not that complex as the image. Key is a pragmatic approach, and incremental implementation.
3)Think big, Start small. And Fast. And flexible. And focus on key issues.
Here are my top 3:
1. Business Intelligence enables an ongoing way of thinking and making decisions for improving the business, not a one time event
2. Business Intelligence is a lot more about improving the business not about the technology
3. Start with where you are regarding readiness to use data, availability and quality of data and build from there. The key is to start.
Managers in firms that do not currently have a business intelligence capability should know the following three facts:
1. A number of solutions and technologies are advertised as business intelligence systems. It is important that managers know why they want a new decision support capability.
2. The most common BI solution is a report and query tool that is used with a database of historical data.
3. Providing business intelligence in an organization is only effective when managers are in the habit of making fact-based decisions and the company culture supports maintaining and using the system.
Managers in firms that do not currently have a business intelligence capability should know the following three facts:
1. A number of solutions and technologies are advertised as business intelligence systems. It is important that managers know why they want a new decision support capability.
2. The most common BI solution is a report and query tool that is used with a database of historical data.
3. Providing business intelligence in an organization is only effective when managers are in the habit of making fact-based decisions and the company culture supports maintaining and using the system.
I'll throw in my two cents:
1. Ability to manage the organization by the facts. It is surprising to me how many organizations don't have the data they need when they need it, so a majority of decisions are made by intuition instead of knowing the facts.
2. Ability to provide data across the spectrum of organizational needs, from the day-to-day to the strategic.
3. Data is presented to users so that they can understand what is being presented and can quickly pull together information without requiring IT assistance (in most cases).
That being said, it is always good to look at the particular pain points in the organization and use those to sell the program internally (e.g., inability to create dashboards without manual intervention). Also, some of the features of the toolsets may provide a big selling point. For one organization, the simple ability for certain users to be able to schedule their reports and send them automatically to the appropriate staff boosted productively significantly.
As a final note, I would recommend reading Competing on Analytics. That book did a really good job for making the business case for BI.
I like the "magic wand" approach, as in asking the potential buyer, "if you could wave a magic wand right now, what kind of information do you want and need to help you make better business decisions that are not available to you today?"
That serves two purposes. First, it allows the potential buyer to think outside the box about what he/she believes is important and second, likely provides real life opportunities to showcase the benefits and approach of using BI solutions.
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