|
data warehousing & business intellegence
"The BusinessValue of BusinessIntelligence"bySteve Williams and Nancy WilliamsDecisionPath Consulting
Six Montgomery Village Ave., Suite 622, Gaithersburg MD 20879 . (301) 926-8323BUSINESS VALUE
data warehousing & business intellegence
The Business
Value of Business
Intelligence
Steve Williams and Nancy WilliamsDecisionPath ConsultingSteve WilliamsNancy Williams Historically, many data warehousing and business intelligence (BI)initiatives have been IT-driven, and much of the focus within theContact Information: industry has been on the technical aspects of delivering informa-Steve Williams tion to the BI user community. Having arrived at a point where301-926-2452 many of the technical challenges and tradeoffs are at least wellsteve.williams@decisionpath.com understood, attention has shifted toward expanding the ways inwhich BI can be used to deliver business value.
As always, the BI vendors are key players in the market expansionprocess - through product innovation and their articulation ofvalue propositions. Key vendor initiatives include: (1) offering pre-integrated BI product offerings - generally known as packagedanalytical applications; (2) advocating expansion of the BI footprintwithin organizations, often referred to as "BI for the masses" and/or "enterprise analytics;" and (3) positioning the use of theirproducts as reflective of "BI best practices."
As promising as expanded use of BI may be, there is still the needfor careful and balanced discussion of the specific business andtechnical preconditions for capturing the business value of busi-ness intelligence, particularly in today's tight IT investment climate.The goal of this article will be to contribute to the emerging dialogon the subject of business value by extrapolating from BI lessonslearned and from DecisionPath Consulting's experience workingwith Fortune 1000 customers and Government agencies.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE JOURNAL . FALL 2003BUSINESS VALUE
IntroductionIn the 1990s, much investment in IT was focused on As the 1990s came to a close, enterprise applications hadenterprise applications - such as ERP, SCM, and CRM - and been widely adopted by major organizations, and innova-on connectivity between trading partners via the Internet and tors were beginning to look at how to leverage IT formore traditional means such as EDI. The business benefits purposes such as strategic enterprise management,of these investments included transactional efficiency, managing customer profitability, improving supply chaininternal process integration, back-office process automation, and/or operations performance, improving "front-office"transactional status visibility, and reduced information business processes (such as sales force management andsharing costs. campaign management) and improving indirect businessprocesses (such as budgeting and business planning). OnWhile some of the enterprise applications also provided BI, the data warehousing side, many of the technical chal-the primary motivation for many of these investments was to lenges had been overcome, spawning the opportunity toachieve better control over day-to-day operations. For expand the use of data warehousing to new parts of theexample, ERP systems allow companies to track order enterprise and to industries where adoption lagged.status, inventory, and customer service in real time, SCMsystems provide supply chain planning functions, and CRM As a result of these developments, we are now presentedsystems provide sales pipeline management and call center with an opportunity to marry organizational desire tomanagement tools. In the data warehousing world, all of better leverage information with the technical ability tothese applications - and others - were considered sources of deliver information to support a wider variety of businessdata that could used to provide business intelligence. processes that impact the bottom line. To their credit,vendors in the BI community have recognized thisIn the 1990's, we also saw the emergence and maturation of opportunity and are delivering a steady stream of innova-data warehousing as a specialty field focused on helping tive BI products. As always, however, innovative prod-organizations make better use of the vast amounts of raw ucts and/or innovative uses of IT come with uncertaintytransactional data captured by enterprise applications. Ma... [download for more]
|
