subject: Accurate Business Intelligence Imperative For Taking Long-term Strategic Decisions [print this page] In immensely competitive scenario of today, accurate business intelligence has become imperative for taking long-term strategic decisions. A well-designed business intelligence solution improves efficiency on IT as well as business side of an organization. The role of CIO becomes important for choosing the right tools and coordinating with outside agencies.
Business Intelligence is a tool to collect and analyze information to formulate a successful business strategy. It generally includes information on products, customers, sales, customer service, market demand etc. helping the companies in taking crucial decisions. Right business intelligence gives an organization a competitive edge.
The companies can collate business data through various sources on their own or outsource the task. There are agencies that collect the information required by businesses and supply them with it, so that they can focus on their core job. Such agencies specialize in their jobs, having the right channels to get the information.
Business intelligence is usually used for long-term strategic decision making, while in the short term, business decisions are taken without experimenting or analyzing too much, depending on intuition.
The companies typically take three types of decisions strategic, tactical and operational. Strategic decisions are the most important as they put at stake the future of entire organizations. These include issues such as new product development, acquisition, company merger, market expansion, etc. Such decisions create the roadmap for a company. Business intelligence has a big role to play in the strategic decisions.
Tactical decisions focus on short-term goals dealing with immediate activities of the company such as adding new features to a product or increasing the price. Operational decisions deal with the routine things such as transaction of funds, approving or declining a specific application, appointing people, etc.
When assessing business intelligence capabilities, there are four levels to consider Reporting, Dashboards, Analysis and Analytics. Reporting is to create recurring, standard, reports in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Key function is to reduce data consolidation and aggregation from various sources in repetitive manner. Dashboards contain aggregated strategic company data, comparable presentations and consolidated performance indicators. Data is translated into graphics, charts, gauges and illustrations to simplify the communication.
At the analysis level, the system provides consolidated information that users can detail and filter. Analytics is the topmost level, providing automated intelligent data analyses based on sophisticated logic systems.
A well-designed business intelligence solution provides information across an organization in consistent, reliable manner. It improves efficiency on both the information technology (IT) side and the business side of the organization. On the IT side, employees are freed from the recurring task of creating and changing data reports, while on the business side, the users have to spend less time in analyzing data. One can work on it on all Internet enabled devices.
Research business intelligence companies to find a leader. They optimize corporate report standards, put up a master data management plan, establish corporate data governance, utilize report visualization, leverage web technologies and focus on cross-organizational efforts.
Role of the CIO is important for business intelligence projects, whether these are done in-house or outsourced. The CIO moderates between the departments that are involved, the internal IT group and the outside agencies. Their job is to make sure that the system reports reliable content to top management. They have to define the objectives, choose tools and outside agencies to support the process.
