I am returning from a three day retreat with a dozen BI strategists, authors, and technologists. The conversations were engaging and challenging and incredibly wide-ranging, and the setting was a few steps shy of Eden. The intimate and casual atmosphere allowed us to deal with some big issues at a meaningful depth, but that depth frequently distilled to a simple clarity.
So, I am going to publish a couple of posts on “first principles.” Today, we’ll chat about the raison d’etre of BI and what that tells us about priorities. Tomorrow, we’ll extend that with a discussion of relevant management policies, riffing off the entertainingly simple All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulgham.
Business Intelligence exists to help us find and implement ways of making a business run better.
It’s a set of practices, skills, and technologies used to do three things:
- Create a digital representation of what is going on in a physical business system
- Use the digital representation to investigate root causes of both good and bad outcomes in the physical business system
- Change policies, methods, and procedures in the physical business system to generate better outcomes
The genesis and ultimate yardstick of BI is tangible improvement in real-life business processes. It’s not about managing numbers. A lot of talk and energy and money is being spent data-centric-ly, and BI growth has stalled. We need to get back to basics if we’re going to get to the next inflection point in BI adoption and impact. BI technologies, consultants, and trainers have to connect with and inspire the people conducting the real-world business system. That will require BI tools that real-world users can use – and enjoy using. We have to liberate end-users to innovate and collaborate in peer-to-peer models akin to web 2.0, so that BI data, rules, visualizations, and themes adapt at the pace of the real-world.
I do not believe the solution is educating technical people on business processes. Nor do I believe that the solution is educating business people on how to use technical tools. What we need are technologies that deliver today’s functions in a way that really engages users the way they want to be engaged – and consulting, training, and management processes that encourage business users to take BI and turn it into something process-centric and relevant.
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