Business Intelligence

Article published by Alexandre do Monte Lee on May 27th 2010

Companies in general and Chief Information Officers (CIO) in particular currently face the following challenges:

• Focus on organizational efficiency only is no longer enough;
• Enterprise data and information volume grows exponentially and requires serious attention and awareness;
• Alignment and proximity between data (BI) and processes (BPM);
• Increasing number of data analysis dimensions required by the business.

Business Intelligence refers to the broad range of applications and technologies used to search, store, analyze and provide access to data and information, helping business leaders to make better decisions and monitor the business performance efficiently. Some areas of Business Intelligence with broad potential application stand out, namely: budget planning and control, monitoring strategy, analytical information drill-down, customer segmentation, process performance, risk analysis and fraud prevention.

Key Success Factors

The main key success factors associated with a Business Intelligence solution implementation are:

• Usability and flexibility offered by the IT platform to decision makers, with regard to reporting, dashboards, multidimensional analysis and scorecards;
• Information publishing control through well-defined access profiles;
• Ability to consistently, systematically, structurally, accuratly and fully feed and centralize operating and finantial data in computer databases. Otherwise, information “islands” will be unintentionally created throughout the organization, compromising the transparency and credibility of the information extracted from the Business Intelligence Platform;
• Top-level and mid-level management teams involvement and commitment, besides the CIO and Information Technology teams;
• Understanding that a Business Intelligence solution is a management and decision support tool and not merely an information technology platform.

Implementing the Solution

A successfull Business Intelligence solution implementation is accomplished through two phases : Requirements Definition and Design & Development of the Technological Infrastructure to support the solution.

Requirements Definition phase is focused on defining business information needs and business essential measures and evaluations, regarding business performance measurement and decision support. The involvement and commitment of the management team and decision makers within the organization is crucial at this point, ensuring that the final solution meets organizational management control and strategic monitoring needs.

During the Design and Development phase, to ensure compliance with the requirements identified in the previous phase, technological components should be carefully chosen, customized and assembled. Along with the management team and decision makers within the organization, this phase requires the involvement of internal IT teams, external IT suppliers and all employees who have knowledge related to the various sources of information needed. The solution architecture is based on three main layers:

Data and Application Integration: once identified all sources of information (databases, applications, external systems, portals) that are relevant to the indicators required by managers and decision makers, integration between multiple repositories and applications is performed, followed by extraction and data transformation engines configuration.

Business Intelligence Platform: standing as the main solution layer, provides the central data repository (Data Warehouse) where information from the previous layer is gathered, security access settings to data and entities schemas associated with the target business. This layer focuses on three areas:

• Reporting: provides pre-defined or ad-hoc maps and reports;
• Dashboard: provides navigable dashboards / scorecards, in which performance indicators (KPIs) and alerts are presented;
• Analysis: provides multidimensional analysis capabilities, using Data Mining and OLAP Cubes manipulation tools.

Presentation (Multiple Channels): user-related and frontend layer, makes decision support and organizational performance information available through multiples channels, like portals, institutional sites, e-mail, mobile phones and spreadsheets. In this layer, information may the published to external entities, clients, partners and suppliers (ex: through portals), towards a better collaboration between all the involved parties.

Solution Benefits

A Business Intelligence solution implementation offers the following main benefits:

• Use of paper-based reports is minimized through the use and adoption of business performance online dashboards, with immediate cost savings (paper and printing);
• Faster decision making, since the information needed is available to decision makers in real time;
• More accurate and fact-based decisions, since more support information is available and more scenarios may be evaluated and simulated. The organization gains additional knowledge due to the ability of multidimensional analysis offered by BI platform;
• Centralization of information, after being transformed and loaded into a single management control repository, through extraction strategies and mechanisms from multiple organization operating systems;
• Increased performance monitoring capacity, given the system’s ability to dynamically answer all questions asked by business decision makers. With greater monitoring capability comes an organization with greater operation transparency, opening the possibility of information publishing through internal and external portals and web sites;
• Elimination of custom, application-attached reporting systems throughout the organization, since the BI platform allows any decision maker to create dynamic and customized reports based on a 360º organization perspective in real time. 

About the author

Alexandre do Monte Lee is Partner and Member of the Board at Infosistema, managing the Business Consulting unit. He is graduated in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico and is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and a PMI Project Management Professional (PMP).