Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

The Most Successful Business Intelligence Tool

Published: April 15, 2008

When evaluating, selecting and deploying business intelligence tools, one of the most important steps is to understand which segment of user needs you are trying to fulfill and then match the tool to that segment.

Business intelligence (BI) has become a smorgasbord of user interfaces, with certain modules generating more excitement than others. Predictive analytics garners attention in its ability to save a company millions of dollars from a single, optimized decision. Meanwhile, dashboards excite executives, helping them to better manage the business, identifying trends and problems from multiple perspectives. Business query tools (often referred to as ad hoc) empower business analysts and power users to build their own queries to investigate exceptions and discover new opportunities for improving the business.

With so many choices, where is a company to start on a business intelligence deployment and which module is the most important?

Different Modules for Different Users

Different users require different tool capabilities as shown in the spectrum in Figure 1. Certain tools will span multiple user segments. For example, OLAP is positioned as a tool for business analysts and information workers because of its ability to analyze vast amounts of data while slicing, dicing and drilling down. However, OLAP extends into the executives and managers segment, particularly when a dashboard provides the starting view. Under the covers, an OLAP engine provides navigation abilities and quick summaries such as top 10 products or top 10 customers.

Figure 1: Different Users Require Different Tool Capabilities
Source: Successful Business Intelligence

In evaluating, selecting and deploying tools, one of the most important steps in the process is to understand which segment of user needs you are trying to fulfill and then match the tool to that segment. Just as you would not give a hammer to someone who needs a screwdriver, you should never give a production report tool to someone who, for example, needs a business query tool. The tools have distinct capabilities intended for a particular profile of user and application.

Determining Importance

The importance of any given module or tool depends upon the particular user or department. With so many vendors, tool modules and diverse user needs, IT is often forced to prioritize according to whoever shouts the loudest or which department has the biggest budget. In contemplating modules to deploy or expand, consider how much each module improves:

• User reach and empowerment: Currently, business intelligence is used by only 25% of employees in any organization. See Figure 2. Putting relevant information in the hands of everyday decision makers is a top priority for many IT departments.

Figure 2: Business Intelligence Usage and Company Size
Source: Successful Business Intelligence survey results, 513 qualified responses

• Stakeholder and user perception: IT is often perceived as a gatekeeper to the data. When users can’t get to the data, they certainly can’t make informed or fact-based decisions. Out of desperation, many will ask to have all data dumped into Excel or Microsoft Access. This can lead to some other problems. Consider which capabilities will have the most positive impact on user perception. For some, that may be a dashboard. For others, it may mean deploying a business query tool. And, there may be other users who require real-time access via Excel.
  
  
• Ability to solve a particular problem: Demonstrating small wins is important in any BI deployment; and if a particular module and tool addresses an individual department’s analytic need quickly and easily, then look for these opportunities. Whether or not the tool can later be scaled to the enterprise is a consideration, but sometimes you need small successes to be able to articulate the value of business intelligence for the company as a whole.
  
  
• Value of the decisions: Another way to evaluate the importance of a particular BI capability is by assessing the value of the decision optimized by business intelligence. This is where investments in predictive analytics are most justified. If, for example, a retailer can provide better online product pairings and recommendations, what is the dollar value of the lift in sales? Advanced visualization tools can help still other users more easily find otherwise hidden anomalies or optimize a process by displaying data graphically. However, sometimes the aggregate in value from the thousands of little decisions that, for example, a single, parameterized report supports can be more significant.

In multiple surveys, companies consistently rank the business query tool as one of the most successfully deployed BI modules. See Figure 3. Of course, with any survey, success is often in the eye of the beholder. (The person with a nail will rate a hammer more important than a screwdriver!) To control for this, I looked at the overall success ranking by different user types.

Figure 3: Most Successful Aspects of BI Deployment
Source: Successful Business Intelligence

Survey respondents who described themselves as information consumers ranked fixed reports as most important, followed closely by ad hoc query tools. The fact that these information consumers rank business query tools as so important reflects that they too benefit from the ability of power users to create reports. For both power users and information consumers alike, business query tools allow the business to more quickly analyze information and respond to a rapidly changing business environment without having to rely exclusively on expert programmers or the IT department.

This is not to say that fixed reports are not important. They are! One of the key reasons for failure with business query tools is that the vast number of reports, data sources and information elements can become overwhelming when the initial deployment does not contain fixed reports. Companies have to organize for a self-service reporting environment by ensuring an appropriate amount of governance remains in place.

Surprising to me is that integration with Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint is not more highly ranked. While I think users would like these interfaces to be better supported, I suspect that spreadmarts and subsequent data chaos are to blame. In other words, it’s not the tools that are the problem, but rather the way they are used. The latest versions of many BI suites and solutions from niche vendors provide much better Excel integration. As companies begin to take advantage of the newer ability to have live data within Excel, the success of these modules should move up in the ranking.

Organizing for Self-Service Reporting

Given the overall importance of business query tools within a total BI deployment, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when deploying these modules so that users are indeed empowered rather than overwhelmed.

The most important aspect to get right is the business metadata layer. This aspect has to be business-oriented and flexible. Ideally, IT and the business should collaboratively design the business meta layer; and in some companies, power users within the business maintain the metadata layer. Companies that make the metadata layer inflexible or controlled by an unaligned IT department often complain that users continue to create personal spreadmarts.

While business query tools should enable the business to more rapidly investigate issues and explore new opportunities, chaos can follow if certain policies are not established early in a deployment. Shared reports need to be quality assured and centrally maintained. When they aren’t, then users will create dozens of variations of the same report. Too often, when IT hands over the report creation process to the business, they abandon previously established best practices for sharing reports. An unfortunate backlash occurs when the only reports that can be trusted are those developed by IT. To prevent this situation, IT must proactively monitor which reports are most frequently accessed and store these in a more controlled area. The business also should recommend report candidates for this shared area.

There are a multitude of business intelligence tools available to suit every user’s work style. While the tools have evolved and matured in the last 20 years, using the right tool in the right way continues to be a key ingredient of the most successful deployments.

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