Bridging the gap between Business and Business Intelligence

During several years of my career within BI space, I have always felt that there has been a big gap between the business and business intelligence. If you try to analyze the reasons for failure of the BI implementations, you will notice that the vendor who did a whole lot of hard(?) work in creating the nice dash-boards, charts and alerts lacked in understanding of the customer's business. Lets drill down on some of the reasons. Non-Actionable Analytics Lack of understanding of business leads to many fancy charts which show some values but this information is mere good to have. However a decision maker needs actionable insight which means, show what is not as per plan, what is causing it and how to tackle that. So it is important to define the information delivery that can take care of this issue. Lack of sense for Number This is another area where people skills plays a major role. Not many people in the organization have this capability to understand the trends being shown by the BI tools. Again its important for the BI service provider to design the report in such a way that the information can be assimilated by a layman. Complex Tools Simplicity kills !! I am firm believer of this. You can take examples of Google & i-Pod, they got hugely popular because of their ease of use. Most of the commercial BI tools available in the market are very complex. This leads to poor adoption (usage) of the framework. I do understand they try to provide maximum features they can offer to their customers, but 95% of the time a basic user uses 5% of the features. So simplicity plays a significant role in better adoption. I remember a self service reporting tool I created during my career at Andale, it was an instant hit just because of its very simple two clicks operation to get the required information. Adhoc Analysis A typical BI implementation will give you a visibility on the pre-defined metrics. However to use the real potential of the application, one needs to have people with understanding the data level to do the adhoc what-if analysis. These analysis plays a significant role in taking strategic decisions. In other words, creating standard reports is not BI is all about, one needs to to exploit it in best possible way. So an involvement of people having domain expertise as well as analytics perspective can be a great value addition to the organization. Apart from that most of the companies don't have the people who can understand the reason for drop or jump in a particular trend so a typical implementation can give you a signal that something is wrong but can't tell the exact area to focus. Identifying an internal (or external) resource will be a good idea. As per my understanding, BI implementation doesn't ends after creating data warehouse, reporting system and a couple of models but its just beginning. The BI framework will provide you the visibility and fun is to keep asking further questions (using ad-hoc analysis) to understand the area of focus completely. This is the point I feel one truly realizes the actual power of business intelligence and that's what I call empowering business decisions. Happy Decisions :)