How to drive greater returns on your BI investments

By Mr. Sunny Pokala

Organizations today are faced with the dual challenges of managing intra-organizational information and monitoring a vast reservoir of information from the external environment. Survival requires effective use of information and decision technologies to gather, manage and exploit knowledge. In an information-intensive economy where continual knowledge renewal is the basis of competitive advantage, it is important to manage an enterprise’s internal information so as to augment its capacity. In this regard, business intelligence (BI) technology can play a crucial role in the decision-making process.

User friendly

BI software has to become more accessible to casual users to have a wider impact. The more consumers of information you have, the greater will be the value you will obtain from your BI tools. To truly deliver BI to everyone a high degree of sophistication via a very simple interface that requires no training is important. Successful BI practitioners follow this "simple and no training required" approach to make business intelligence easy to comprehend and assimilate, guiding users to the answers they need. Also, there needs to be an option where users can request regular updates via e-mail.

Easy access

The new face of BI involves delivering active information to users within the context of their everyday activities. For example, a sales manager might depend on insight from a BI system to spot orders over a certain value and then recommend a premium supplier based on present promotions and availability. Meanwhile, sales representatives might receive updates about customer issues involving their accounts. Production managers could obtain alerts about escalating order volumes that impact an assembly line.

BI as a Service

BI operations can take the form of services that can be showcased via portals, dashboards, other types of business processes etc. Such service-oriented BI applications can herald a whole new facet for the BI industry as companies apply their domain expertise to a particular industry or vertical. The service oriented BI applications ensures: Availability to necessary information. Smooth procurement and distribution of goods. Customer satisfaction via interactive websites.

Search technologies

The real value of search technology comes when you can feed your search engine from all enterprise data sources and analyse results along the way. The users should ideally be enabled to search for enterprise content as easily as they use the search engine on the web. By enabling users to easily locate key facts through simple keyword searches, your organisation will realise significant productivity gains and users will spend less time looking for information. Unfortunately, most BI tools offer only rudimentary search capabilities. Only a small amount of BI information gets archived, which limits the usefulness of this model.

Portable BI

Smart phones make web access easy. As corporate honchos get a taste of the capabilities of these devices they are requesting access to corporate data, such as the latest sales results, an inventory report etc. Since the memory and processing power of most mobile devices cannot match those of desktops and laptops, it is critical to deliver the most relevant data. The ideal scenario would be to create centralized, web-based BI applications that can receive requests and feed information back to mobile users.

The author is chairman, InfoBuild India and president, Amtex Systems. He can be contacted at sunny@infobuild.in