Business Intelligence is a key factor for companies to survive the economic downturn and to turn it into a competitive advantage. BI supports organisations to become High Performance Businesses, people can add serious value to organisations using BI, it will help separate winners from losers.

In High Performance Businesses (HPB), there are very distinct differences in comparison with low performers when it comes down to business intelligence:

1) HPB have a unified corporate view on how their business works and support it with high value BI at reasonable cost
2) Trustworthy, actionable information is available whenever needed
3) Information democracy, everyone has access, not just specialists
4) BI connects strategy with execution, performance is target driven and supported by BI

Recently an article was published claiming that the ROI of business intelligence has so far been very thin. In my opinion this cannot be blamed on business intelligence itself, it is very likely that the organisational goals and implementation strategy were misaligned and probalby non-existent. If you don’t get ROI from BI, it’s time for some serious rethinking.

You can read more about this in an article in Computable…

Mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations, market developments and cost reductions are just a couple of business drivers behind rationalization. The effects on business intelligence however, are often overlooked in these transformations. Often this leads to myopia or even temporary blindness when it comes down to true insight in the business performance of enterprises.

There is a set of basic principles and questions that will help you to ensure that business intelligence stays fully aligned with the business priorities: 

1) In any business transformation a set of tangible business benefits is defined, along with the roadmap to success. The change requirements on information management and business intelligence must be a core part of this roadmap.

2) When consolidation of business intelligence environments is required, the evolutionary approach - slowly changing towards the desired state - will not work as these changes will take way too long to render solid business benefits. A revolutionary approach, cutting hard and deep to achieve a lean & mean, yet agile state will hurt but works remarkably well. 

3) The business must be cognizant of the fact that changes to a mission critical environment - like business intelligence - will not happen overnight. And the IT deparment must realize that time-to-market of business intelligence is of paramount importance to the business. So, now it’s time to truly co-operate, after all we’re all working in the same enterprise.

4) When rationalizing business intelligence, do ask yourself why all historical data should be converted to the new environment. What’s the business value of this? Does it outweigh the necessary investments?

5) Why do specific parts of the organization have their own business intelligence environments and staffing? Is there a specific business rationale behind this and is it adding to business efficiency? Has the shared service center approach been investigated?

There is many more valuable principles and questions to investigate - depending on the maturity of the intelligent business - but let’s discuss that over a cup of coffee…

According to analysts, more than 80% of all available data is unstructured data. But only since a couple of years there seems to be more focus and attention for managing unstructured data. But isn’t it too late already? The chaos around unstructured data management in organizations is rapidly increasing, and large volumes of data are stored in an unstructured manner (e.g. more and more people are using their Inbox as their information repositories), people spend an increasing amount of time in searching and analyzing information to meet their responsibilities. Why is unstructured data important? What can we do with it in the first place? Where are we? Didn’t we already loose control a long time ago? lees verder…

Every decade has its popular management style. It’s a particular form of fashion: we have seen -and maybe personally tested over time- management by decree, self-steering groups, management by walking around and many more. Now, a new style rapidly emerges: management by e-mail. Driven by the arguably most powerful new communication medium after the Internet itself, this not-so-explicit style of management seems to have become a burden or joy for managers and employees almost without notice. lees verder…