Leader: BI not just for rocket scientists

Taking the data held in your business systems and analysing it to make better decisions about the direction of the organisation would seem to be a pretty standard move.

When done well, business intelligence (BI) can bring big benefits - it can be used to track sales patterns or keep track of costs - Nasa is even using it to check the safety of the space shuttle. But for many companies BI is something of a struggle. And as more sources of data become available from wireless sensors and RFID tags to name just two, there will be even more to keep track of.

Almost two thirds of organisations say their BI investments haven't improved customer management by a significant amount - and a quarter said the systems have made no difference or have even made customer management worse, according to research commissioned by Unisys.

Organisations are still missing out on the insights that analysing business information can offer, and too many are using business intelligence tools inconsistently across different departments so that the reports they produce have little meaning for the business as a whole.

According to the Unisys research, one in four companies cannot use their BI systems to cross-sell or maximise opportunities between departments or products, with the high levels of manual data processing and analysis getting the blame for the lack of success.

On top of this too many organisations confuse buying the technology with creating a strategy.

Analyst Gartner suggests building a 'competency centre' to define the BI vision and set standards and managing programmes. And the key is to bring together IT and business heads.

Making business intelligence an IT project is likely to doom it to failure. Clearly there is a major IT element in terms of checking that the right databases are connected and that the necessary levels of security and performance are in place.

But to get the most from these systems the vision has to be as wide as possible. BI should reach across the business from side to side and from top to bottom if it is to be of any use. Tucking it away in one corner won't help anyone.