Business Intelligence and the Economic Gloom: A Perspective
With the economic meltdown of the financial world and a severe downturn and meltdown in the Automobile and Retail sectors we are possibly headed for tough times ahead.
With the global economy being so intertwined there is no sector or industry vertical that is immune to this crisis.
The key questions running in every CEO/CFO/CIOs mind is ‘survival’. The words doing the rounds are ‘savings’, ‘cuts’, ’minimize investments’, ’reduce spend’ etc. etc. etc. And of the key enterprise functions that usually receive these ‘cuts’ is IT. The CIO is typically the first person who is handed a budget cut, asked to trim his unit and reduce spent. The CIO frantically looks at his portfolio to see what could get that cut and more often than not the Business Intelligence is the unit which gets the axe, although mistakenly. BI is often perceived as a ‘nice to have’, ‘can do without’, ‘my business can run without those reports’. Well, organizations and enterprises who still harbor such a feeling have probably still not been able to attain a maturity in terms of its BI capabilities. Or may be they are not being able to get the real benefits out of its BI investment.
In my opinion it is just the time to turn all your attention and energy to ensuring that we capitalize Business Intelligence to ensure maximum benefits in trying to ensure ‘savings’, ‘provide value to your customers’, ‘understand your customer better’.
To understand this a bit better let us see if we can some answers to some of the key questions that are possibly running in the mind of most of the CEOs
o How do I know where I am losing revenue or how do I stop revenue leakages or improve operational efficiencies? à The answer could simply be use your BI platform
o How do I know how many of the customers across my units are unhappy and what are the top reasons for remaining unhappy? à The answer is your BI application should be able to easily be able to give you that answer
o What offers have the highest uptake, so that I could use them to hold on to my current customer base? à The answer could again be use of advanced BI technologies like Predictive Analytics or Data Mining.
So as we can see from the questions above, Business Intelligence is something which deserves possibly the most attention and energy to ensure that organizations are in business, especially in these difficult times. Leave alone reducing spent on BI , a lot of attention is needed to ensure that BI is delivering the business benefits that it should be providing.
A few key aspects that should be looked into by every organization, with regards to BI are:
1. Rationalize your BI system to ensure that the KPIs and Reports relevant to business are coming out
2. If possible run a data quality check to ensure that the reports are accurate and business can depend on them for decision making
3. Ensure that the data is relatively current, old data is as good as no data – improve your data refresh performance and if possible use real time data wherever possible
4. If you have a data mining capability in house , try to use it to aid in better business predictability
All these can be done without any ‘big’ IT investments or going for a new OLAP or ETL tool.
In my view by tidying up your BI space and few good housekeeping activities coupled with a result oriented approach should help in bringing better business capabilities in these gloomy times. Is that not what BI was anyway supposed to do, in good and bad times?
Comments
Yes Somnath, with businesses now recognizing that the BI continuum extends right from operational to strategic levels, BI systems are now attaining 'mission critical' status. If you look at Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2009, BI/analytics delivery sub-systems are linked to at least 4!
Posted by: Vinod Shankar | November 25, 2008 03:25 AM
What is more important is whether BI is getting implemented properly. Tools come next. There are several open source tools available today, which do almost everything an expensive BI tool does.
Check Mondrian, BIRT and Weka.
Great tools to get BI done quickly and very effectively with low cost
Posted by: Haridasan T Nair | December 11, 2008 07:02 AM
Rightly said."BI was anyways supposed to do it irrespective of the times".I think BI has always been a tough concept to sell as the realisation of value to customer has always been intangible.An ideal BI solution should infact have helped businesses in taking strategic decisions considering the bad external environment ahead,which has forced most of them to be in bad shape.I think the current economic downturn should be an eye opener for most of the businesses in realising that they are not immune to the external world and
have the right kind of systems in place for them to take smart decisions.
Posted by: Sanil Kumar Bhaskaran | December 24, 2008 04:50 PM
Haridasan:
Could not agree more on the role of light weight, free wares and I believe they have a greater role to play given the current climate. I will share my thoughts on this segment in one of my blogs in the near future.
Posted by: Somnath Mukherjee | December 29, 2008 05:47 AM