Why your business intelligence is not working
Many businesses are now rethinking their business intelligence strategy these days. Having invested sizable sums in business intelligence or data warehouse programs efforts for years, senior business managers are not often seeing these investments pay off in tangible ways. This has spawned efforts in many organizations to make current their current business intelligence capabilities more mature to better support improved business results.
In our work as business intelligence consultants, we've seen the many challenges organizations face when they begin the journey to achieve mature business intelligence capabilities. This is due to the fact that mature business intelligence capabilities entail a significant paradigm shift in how information is positioned in the organisation.
Traditionally most businesses have historically thought of information as a cost centre, and have primarily positioned their “decision support” or “management information” efforts toward producing reports or providing individual users with ad hoc reports or data downloads on demand. Business intelligence and data warehousing efforts are often regarded as a new and improved extension of these legacy information models. In a cost centre model, there is typically little – if any – understanding of how information is being used by the business. The operating model is generally to have IT fill orders for information based on individual business users’ requests.
Mature business intelligence programs, in contrast, position information as a potential profit centre. Information is regarded as a competitive enabler that can support business stakeholders in proactively managing organizational performance to achieve improved business results. Businesses with mature business intelligence capabilities have moved away from the “order taking” model toward identifying new and innovative ways that information can be used in a consistent fashion across the organization to achieve optimal business results.
The answer: As the saying goes, “No pain, no gain” and one critical success factor in achieving business intelligence maturity is to evolve and redefine the business and technology organizational model. Check out some of these great examples of what is possible with Tableau Software. Tableau Software displays information in ways that your brain can best interpret it, helping any decision makers rapidly gain a clear view of what's going on in their company. Tableau can also help identify previously hidden data features and trends, and uncover valuable nuggets of information that would otherwise have remained concealed.
As you'll see, the possibilities are endless...
Don't be surprised if you find yourself spending a bit of time in the gallery, making some unexpected discoveries, and gathering ideas for your own data analysis projects.