Business Intelligence has become synonymous with the modern age of computers to the extent that we both forget the lessons of past whilst at the same time blaming the ills of poor execution on the computer age. We fail to remember that our predecessors used “BI” pretty successfully before the advent of the microchip whether in the sphere of commerce, industry or, in war and just because we’ve compressed the analytic process into a small box this does not necessarily make it any better – in fact it often makes it worse, says FSN senior writer, Tony Crowhurst.
We’ve even ended up with slower response times as we wait for people to access their systems and agree changes and we still struggle to get an overall view of our business. We are still too reactive; we need to put business intelligence at the front of the organisation rather than at the back where it can only attempt to act on events that have already occurred.
BI is not so much about the technology it’s about how we translate our organisational environment and goals into a system (whether based on pen and paper or on a computer) into something that allows us to identify problems, issues and trends so that we can makes changes and plan for the future.
Survey after survey highlights the issues surrounding BI – poor partnering with IT, disconnect with strategy and process, too much governance (or, too little) and a lack of skills where they are most needed. There is a plethora of advice on these topics and hopefully the impact of the recession on staffing and revenue will focus minds so that organisations become more decisive and joined up.
In the main it’s all about the graphical user interface - an area where we still struggle to display our performance effectively. We have systems that deliver wonderful pie charts and alerts targeted at areas of responsibility but they do not provide that control room view that we so need. To give an example lets step back 70 odd years...
We’ve all understood the heroism of fighter pilots – particularly during the Battle of Britain. What is less often understood is the impact played by business intelligence. During the Second World War, British Fighter Command relied on an organisational structure based on geographic location. These locations were subdivided into sectors that had tactical control of a main fighter base as well as a number of other satellite fighter bases.
Each main fighter base was autonomous – it had an operations room as well as maintenance and repair facilities for the planes attached to its sector. That in itself isn’t necessarily ground breaking but what the RAF did then was integrate the fighter stations into a command centre that fed in information on enemy attacks from the Royal Observer Corps, as well as radar stations. This information was plotted on a huge table allowing commanders to make decisions almost instantaneously.
The graphical user interface – albeit driven by humans was intrinsic to the success of this system.
Commanders had an up to the minute view of the status displayed to pretty much in 3D. The commanders could then decide on what group to involve. Once activated, the group commander would then have power over of his geographic sector and would decide on which fighter stations should be called upon.
Look at that in modern terms – the IT people (maintenance crews) were integrated into the operational teams (pilots), there was sufficient governance from the control (the CEO and executives) but enough latitude at local level. Training and mentoring went a long way to ensuring that they all knew what the overall strategy was and what their goals were thus ensuring effective use of resources. The rest is as they say is history.
With the advent of touch screens technology - specifically products such as Microsoft Surface and the Apple iPad, we have an opportunity to fuse Business Intelligence more closely into the business and deliver a similar experience to modern organisations.
Vendors now have the technology that is capable of providing a perspective of the entire organisation – perhaps we’ll see enterprises rolling out a smaller version of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise? Whatever the actual size, living in a world that is constantly trying to compress more activity into 24 hours means that we have to act. Humans are primarily visual – what is more intuitive – using a screen to drag and drop a component or change the colour of a metric by hand or, by posting a journal?
A holistic view where customers, suppliers and internals systems come together is required so that a delay in production or a change to a product price does not just update the stock and sales system but it also flows right through to the operational statement.
Finally, we need to recognise the impact of events that happen in social networking sites as well as blogs and newswires. What bearing would the resignation of the CEO of our biggest competitor have on our stock price? Do you know what others are saying about your organisation or products? If not or if you just read the business pages perhaps you should create an alert using Google to check. You may be surprised by what other say about you and your business.
So, what’s the future? Well for information consumers provided that we don’t expect BI (whatever the flavour) to solve our operational challenges without us making the necessary organisational changes we talked about earlier, we’ll be fine.
The future for Technology vendors? It’s great being able to use your Smartphone to order a cab or find a theatre however; collaborating across technologies to deliver value to the enterprise is where the big revenue potential lies. Let’s just hope that vendors are capable of bridging that chasm and we end up in a world where technology works more intuitively.
