Business intelligence—the key to responsiveness

A good decision support system is a vital tool for a manager of a modern enterprise. These systems help managers keep track of what’s happening within and outside the enterprise. Ravi Kathuria elaborates on the need for business intelligence and the essential features required of a good decision enabler

Surviving in the new global business environment requires organisations to be more responsive and agile to changes in their internal and external environments. In order to be responsive, organisations need data and information on a real-time basis across the extended enterprise to gain a competitive advantage. Managers at all levels, from the shop floor to the boardroom, make critical business decisions that impact the success of every organisation. They need to explore opportunities so that they can focus on processes and products that generate profits for the organisation. With these kinds of elements regulating the modern enterprise, today’s decision makers need easy access to up-to-date market and company information from every system in the extended enterprise. These factors have led to the development of business intelligence systems, which provide managers at every level with corporate information dashboards. Business intelligence solutions have become the order of the day, and represent the most important enabling agent for making successful business decisions.

Good business intelligence solutions provide board members with a summary of information and high-level trends that are important for strategy formulation on a global scale. On the other hand, line managers can use business intelligence solutions to analyse and control operational costs more effectively. And on the shop floor, supervisors can use business intelligence systems to generate standard or custom reports to make adjustments to the business plan on an ongoing basis, responding to changes and reacting to customer needs in a global market place.

Customer-centricity has become the norm of the day as enterprises are taking great pains to acquire and retain customers. Being a customer-centric organisation is all about meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Organisations can become customer-centric if they are able to analyse historical data, monitor delivery performance and provide value to their customers. All these activities need complex strategic and operational analysis tools that would help organisations develop the best market strategies and continuously monitor performance through easy to use interfaces such as a Web browser. Business intelligence systems allow organisations to have a grip on what customers want from them today and predict what they would want tomorrow.

One of the most important aspects for any organisation that wishes to be successful is to develop faster time-to-market strategies for both products and services. Time-to-market depends on the efficiency throughout the enterprise, partners, suppliers and the delivery systems network. This can be achieved only if decision makers have visibility as to how business processes are performing throughout each step of the process chain. This is possible through simple and effective report creation so that one understands which business processes are successful and which ones are failures. Business intelligence solutions provide both standard and customised report formats that measure performance indicators such as supplier quality, sales delivery status, capacity, financials, etc. These indicators help organisations to smoothen bumps in organisational processes and achieve faster time-to-market.

Besides all these, enterprises need to be more agile in terms of responding to planned and unplanned changes in the market, internal processes and customer requirements. This can only be achieved with information systems that take into account every piece of data generated by an enterprise’s activities. It is important that business intelligence solutions, which provide tactical strategic information, collate data from heterogeneous data sources within the extended enterprise and take a business-oriented approach to analyse the data. It allows users to create and share business knowledge to execute agile and more effective strategic, tactical and operational programmes to provide competitive edge.

While business intelligence solutions provide shop floor to boardroom information there are many challenges to be overcome while implementing business intelligence solutions within an extended organisation. Since the scope of business intelligence

solutions extend beyond the enterprise to engulf partners, suppliers, customers, industry, etc., enterprises need to implement enterprise-level solutions to consolidate disparate level reporting, query and analysis into a central repository. With a central source of business intelligence it becomes easier, quicker and cheaper to distribute useful information across the extended enterprise. Key requirements for such a solution are scalable web-based interfaces, security management, simple end-user functionality and simple maintenance. In large extended enterprises, data and transaction systems are locked in disparate systems. Therefore, decision makers often do not have access to key information for making critical business decisions. The challenge in such a situation is to provide decision makers with an optimised information platform where data quality and definitions are properly managed so that there is one version of ‘the truth’ for the entire enterprise.

Business intelligence requires enterprises to look at business information re-engineering as they mostly rely on relational databases or on-line transaction processing systems to generate a decision support system. But this kind of information access often relies on current data and does not provide historical data that is very much needed when tracking trends. Therefore, business intelligence systems provide decision makers with a separate information platform for fast and safe decision support. Besides, these business intelligence systems are scalable to cope with increasing volumes of information and users.

Further these business intelligence systems provide fast and easy-to-understand delivery systems in the form of reports and query forms, besides providing a web-based interface. It is important for business intelligence systems to deliver required information without bothering the user on the complex underlying technical architecture.

Summing up, business intelligence systems incorporate complete functionality for decision support and analysis needs. It should be an out-of-the-box solution, which provides all the tools that are needed for improving critical business decision-making. The business intelligence solution should be able to provide built-in content as a standard for ready-to-go implementations saving on specialised skills and to start realising quick RoI (Return on Investment). It should also be developed on an open platform so that it can be connected to any data source or third party reporting tool. These aspects form the basis of a good business intelligence system.