Butler on: Integrated business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) solutions have all too often disappointed - compartmentalised and piecemeal in nature - which is why Butler Group founder Martin Butler is advocating integrated BI (IBI). But this distinction is a million times more important than creating another three-letter acronym...

The promise and attraction of business intelligence (BI) is hard to deny. Think of employees aware of important changes to a particular business process or suppliers able to see information pertaining to stock levels held by preferred customers or confident executives, backed up with trusted, accurate and up to date information relating to various nuances of business performance.

This may sound like the technology equivalent of a holiday brochure but the foundations of such visions are grounded in the cold and hard reality of integrated business intelligence (IBI).

By this I mean ‘proper’ business intelligence – not the isolated, disconnected and overly complex products of the 1990s but the latest web-based architectures, combining data integrity with enterprise-wide access. Such products are designed to be used from the top down, which in technology terms basically means that if the uppermost level of the business can use the solution, then it is a safe bet that everyone else will be OK too.

The arrival of web-based architectures allowed BI to emerge from the shackles of client/server, creating new business opportunities for both the tools’ vendors and their customers. It is not just the technology that has adapted. One of the greatest challenges in recognising that BI tools are no longer just in the realm of the power user is that vendors mask the underlying complexity that existed in the desktop versions of their products in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. This cuts against the grain of many technology vendors, who like nothing more than to beat their drum to a new feature beat.

Giving credit where it is due, it is my observation that the leading vendors have worked extremely hard to facilitate this change - and continue to do so at pace. The more advanced architectures provide a common meta data layer and use the latest web technology to provide zero footprint access without compromising functionality.

With an increased level of users, training can become a real issue. However, most users are familiar with the web, which is a useful basis, as this reduces the learning curve. Internet technologies are also very scalable and lay the technical foundations for allowing a wide range of users to participate within decision-making.

One of the greatest challenges in getting all of this right is cultural in nature and revolves around getting people to take ownership of information and the consequences of changes therein. The problem stems from the fact that business processes span department and functional areas of the business. No individual ‘owns’ the process and so when problems arise, as they inevitably do, the result tends to be finger pointing followed by a series of meetings, when rapid action is what is called for. Adopting a process-centric view can actually help resolve the problem.

The way an organisation can address these problems is to focus on the definition of user profiles and to achieve a shared view of business processes. A graphical view or model of a particular process and respective sub-processes help to establish or clarify the boundaries of ownership. This overcomes many of the problems associated with the way organisations use balanced scorecards, the most common of which is to let the scorecard get out of synch with the corporate strategy.

IBI brings all of these concepts together and captures the undeniable momentum in the BI market. IBI requires that organisations make a strategic-level commitment and deploy solutions that support the strategy and goals of the business as a whole. This contrasts starkly with the typical tactical or point deployments that see BI technology being thrown at one particular information blind-spot after another. This piecemeal approach simply reinforces the compartmentalised views of data and information created by enterprise applications.

IBI aims to break down such boundaries and provide the business with the ability to harness competitive business intelligence from the totality of its data resources.

Martin Butler is founder and president of Butler Group and well known as one of the most incisive commentators on the business use of IT.

Butler Group is holding an Integrated Business Intelligence Symposium on 4 and 5 June 2003. The Symposium will bring together major players from the world of BI, in addition to recognised industry authorities on the topic and is targeted at assisting organisations to make the best decisions on the evaluation, selection and implementation of a BI solution.

For more information about the Symposium, please visit http://www.butlergroup.com/events/ibi.