Vendor Accent

Pervasive BI

John L Kopcke on the next step in the evolution of business intelligence

Successful companies share a common trait. They require the ability to measure and continually improve performance. Rarely has this skill been put to a greater test than in today’s economic environment.

Global economic conditions are driving companies to look for every possible source of growth and profit. Companies must make tough decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Geopolitical uncertainty makes planning harder and more critical than ever. Increased competition requires that companies fine-tune their strategies continually and make rapid mid-course corrections. Stringent new reporting requirements are forcing CEOs and CFOs to put their careers on the line with every quarterly report.

Improving performance in this tough environment requires an understanding of past and current performance that leads companies to make better and more informed decisions for the future. The first step in this process is gaining access to accurate and reliable performance information, which can be a challenge in itself. It is not uncommon to find performance information in most organisations scattered across 10 to 12 unconnected transactional systems.

Since the early 1990s, organisations have used business intelligence (BI) software to access, analyse and share performance information, no matter how fragmented it is and / or where it is stored. The visibility into performance that BI provides is essential to improving business performance.

With the introduction of Business Performance Management (BPM) in the early 2000s, BI has become even more important. BPM gives an organisation visibility into how its businesses are performing, and helps it plan and model to improve that performance. BPM connects goal setting, modelling, planning, monitoring, analysis and reporting into a complete performance management cycle. In this context, BI drives reporting and analytics, which in turn drives planning—the heart of BPM. Simply put, better plans lead to better performance.

BI also plays an important role in what is a common starting point for many performance management initiatives—unlocking large volumes of valuable data trapped in fragmented transactional systems and making it available to business users in actionable formats.

With BI providing insight and BPM enabling organisations to plan and act for the future, it is now possible for them to implement performance management initiatives that span the enterprise. But for these enterprise-wide initiatives to succeed, I believe that BI must evolve beyond its current status as a tool that experts use to report performance to managers and executives, and become an everyday business tool for everyone in the enterprise. In short, BI must become pervasive.

For BI to become pervasive, the user experience must improve so that people can use it easily, thereby ensuring its mass adoption. At the same time, the overall efficiency of deploying and managing BI must increase so that it becomes less expensive that it is at present. For many organisations, the solution to both of these pressing needs begins with consolidating BI platforms and tools into integrated and standardised solutions. With BI integrated and standardised across the enterprise, its benefits come into sharper focus: performance visibility for everyone in the enterprise while lowering total cost of ownership.

Barriers to Pervasive BI

BI solutions today typically bring insight to a select few in the enterprise—IT professionals with the technical knowledge to use the right combination of BI tools to get the information they need. These IT professionals are experts trained to find relevant data no matter of what type or where it is, analyse it, and author reports in a variety of formats for others to consume. Their customers in the organisation are business users such as the line of business managers and divisional and corporate executives who need to better understand what is going on and make more informed decisions for the future.

What business users really want is the ability to answer business questions on their own, without having to rely on experts and without having to become technology experts themselves. They want the ability to use any data without the need to know how to access it or where it is stored or what format it is in. And once they have the data, they want to drill down or up or across to analyse information, create alerts or reports to inform others, and collaborate with peers to decide which actions to take. Because all questions can’t be anticipated, flexibility is key.

All BI vendors share a challenge in meeting these needs. Historically, lines of business and functions in organisations have had different information needs, access requirements and report preferences, and BI vendors have delivered separate and distinct tools to satisfy them: one set of tools for production reporting, another for ad hoc query and analysis, another for multi-dimensional analysis, and yet another for data mining and statistical analysis.

As a result, according to Forrester, most Global 2000 companies and government agencies today have between 5 and 15 different BI solutions in production. Often BI solutions are nothing more than collections of unconnected platforms and tools.

This fragmentation is a huge barrier to pervasive BI: business users can’t work the way they’d like to, and even expert users are burdened by having to learn multiple tools. Another way in which BI fragmentation blocks pervasive use of the technology is through the demands it places on the IT professionals who must deploy and manage BI systems.

Making the challenge even more difficult is the growing complexity of information access and management everywhere in the enterprise. Data is scattered throughout most enterprises in multiple source systems, the amount of data is unmanageable, and change management itself is a huge problem.

For BI to become pervasive, the BI user experience must improve dramatically so that BI becomes an everyday business tool for everyone in the enterprise. Gaining access to information, performing advanced queries and analyses, and authoring reports must become fast, easy and intuitive. Users must be able to accomplish all of these tasks without assistance from IT.

Guiding Principle: make it better— but keep it simple

In an October 2004 article in The Economist magazine, writer Andreas Kluth considers an example from Joe Corn, a social and cultural historian at Stanford University who uses the automobile as a model for how technology must evolve to ensure adoption.

According to Corn, driving the first cars required skill in lubricating various moving parts, sending oil manually to the transmission, adjusting spark plugs, setting the choke, opening the throttle, wielding the crank and knowing what to do when the car broke down.

Drivers today simply turn the ignition key, put their foot on the accelerator, brake and steer. The complexity of modern cars—which are, in fact, sophisticated computers—is shielded from drivers, abstracted away and hidden by a greatly simplified and standardised user interface.

I believe that the evolution of the automobile is an excellent analogy for what must happen to achieve pervasive BI. Efforts to make BI an everyday business tool in enterprises are well underway. These include BI solutions with industry-leading interactive performance dashboards and advanced analytics. Work needs to be done, and vendors have realised this, on simplifying management, for a more manageable BI infrastructure is key to widespread adoption throughout the enterprise.

The author is Chief Technology Officer at Hyperion. He may be contacted at john@hyperion.com