BI & Analytics

About gaining perspective on improving business performance using big data

How long can an organization survive if it keeps making mistakes? How competitive can a company be if its decisions are bad ones? Who wants to have their organization continue to perpetuate making decisions with flawed, misleading, or incomplete information?

Almost all the businesses that I have met in the last 10 years are using a calendar view for external and internal reporting.
When the month ends, the financial controllers and business analysts get to work. They crunch the numbers and produce the monthly spreadsheets and powerpoints. Ten years ago this was done for financials only and the whole process took 3 to 4 weeks. Today this is done much faster and with more business data living a digital life the scope expanded from financials to sales, marketing, production, project management, IT management and many other business area’s.

One of the frustrations I experience is when managers or analysts share with me that their organizations tried to implement progressive management methods, and they either failed or abandoned them. A prominent example is an unsuccessful attempt to implement activity-based costing to measure and manage costs and profit levels of products, services, channels and customers. Other enterprise performance management examples include risk management, customer analytics, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the balanced scorecard.

Data becomes information not only when it informs, but when it also informs at the right time. This requires a different mindset on business metric reporting, and a different technology approach.

Business Intelligence has failed in the last 20 years.

There, I said it.
And here is why.

1. Most businesses are still doing "monthly reporting".
2. Most businesses are despite having purchased all the BI tools in the world still using excel and powerpoint to create their reports.
3. Spreadsheets and Presentations are extremely labor intensive and known to be full of human errors.
4. Most BI Licences are never used or hardly implemented.