Why Do I Need a Business Intelligence

Solution?

Business intelligence, or BI, is a term that is thrown

around incessantly in the business world today. It used to be a term one associated
with large enterprises up until fairly recently. However, as BI technology has advanced,
deployment, licensing, and support options have increased making it more affordable
for small and midsized organizations. But the question you may be asking is, Why do I
need BI?
First, lets discuss what BI really is. Mukhles Zaman, author of the article, Business
Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs, defined business intelligence as: neither a product nor
a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and
databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis, and manipulation of
information, which provides the business community with easy access to business
data. BI analyzes historical data- the data businesses generate through transactions or
by other kinds of business activities- and helps businesses by analyzing the past and
present business situations and performances. By giving this valuable insight, BI helps
decision-makers make more informed decisions and supplies end-users with critical
business information on their customers or partners, including information on behaviors
and trends.

Given this definition, virtually every small, midsized, and large business can benefit from
BI. Specific issues or scenarios that are good indicators a BI discussion should take
place include:

The need to integrate data from multiple business applications or data sources

Lack of visibility into the companys operations, finances, and other areas

The need to access relevant business data quickly and efficiently

Increasing volume of users requiring and accessing information and more endusers requiring analytical capabilities

Rapid company growth or a recent or pending merger/acquisition

Introduction of new products

Upgrades within the IT environment

There are several benefits a BI solution offers to an organization regardless of size:

Share information efficiently and effectively with people across your

organization. BI makes it easy for everyone- from decision-makers to functional
teams- to access and analyze up-to-date information anytime, anywhere. Everyone
throughout the company can make better decisions, faster.

Empower your people. Providing employees with access to analytical data that
is readily available and understandable allows them to work more effectively and
support the overall business strategy.

Simplify collaboration and sharing and improve alignment with a single

source for accurate financial and operational information. Having a single, central
location allows you to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs), access reports,
analyze your data, and share documents. All of the functional areas are aligned to
articulate strategies, set objectives, and monitor the organizations performance so you
can make better informed and timely decisions that support your overall business
strategy.

Gain insights to understand and analyze your business performance and

opportunities on a deeper level. Analyze and evaluate information that is more
accessible and easy to interact with to make strategic and tactical decisions.

Deliver meaningful analysis and reporting. Readily track and analyze KPIs
against key business goals to gain a better understanding of how your business is
performing today and not when its too late to impact performance.

Have a solution with the scalability and flexibility to grow and change as
your organization does. Many companies rely solely on the most widely used BI tool,
the Excel spreadsheet. While Excel offers many useful features such as graphs, charts,
and pivot tables which assist in decision-making, it doesnt scale to your business. Also,
compiling data from multiple, disparate databases is time-consuming and is prone to
errors. However, Excel is still a key component of a total BI solution.
Read about the analytics challenges that organizations like yours are facing and how to
overcome them through business intelligence solutions in The Truth About Analytics
Reporting Trends Report.

Business intelligence is today's tech priority for a reason:

Information is growing at an exponential rate. Information
contained in enterprises worldwide is expected to reach 120,000
petabytes by 2010, according to a new survey by IDC (a sister
company to CIO's publisher). The study, commissioned by
Teradata, surveyed 1,072 line-of-business executives and IT
professionals in 22 countries.
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As information grows, the need for organizations to manage it
and make it actionable grows as well. Getting that information in
a timely mannerand to the right people in the right places,
throughout an organizationis an important means to enterprise
success.
Here's a snapshot of today's information management needs,
according to the survey:

The amount of information is growing rapidly.Eighty-one

percent of respondents say the amount of information
available with which to make decisions has "grown
significantly" or "increased a lot."

We've reached information overload. Seventy-five

percent report feeling overloaded with information, and 40
percent rated their degree of being overwhelmed at 4 on a
5 point scale.

The need for timely information is more pressing.A third

of respondents said access to up-to-date information within
seconds or hours is critical to their companies.

Diann Daniel

Accessing unstructured information is difficult but

increasingly necessary to decision making. Fifty-five
percent of the information dealt with in decision making is
unstructuredfor example, e-mails, documents, or images
yet two-thirds of respondents use mostly manual methods
to search and access such data.

To manage the avalanches of information, business

intelligence tools are becoming more widespread. No
longer the sole domain of analytical experts in
headquarters, single departments or applications, business
analytics are used by front-line workers, multiple
departments and by users outside the organization. Fortyeight percent of respondents said their front-line staffcall
center, bank tellers, and so onare making more decisions
than last year, and 54 percent said front-line staff had
business intelligence solutions to support them. And 24
percent of respondents allow customers to access their
business intelligence applications, 21 percent allow
suppliers, and 20 percent distributors.

Timely business intelligence has become mission

critical to many enterprises.Sixty-four percent of
respondents said that if a business intelligence system was
down one day or less, they expected a materially negative
impact to business operations. Twenty-one percent said
negative results would come from a downtime of one hours
or less.

Signs Your Business Needs Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is no longer a term only associated with large organizations. As the price of
hardware and storage drops, business intelligence technology is advancing with flexible deployment and
licensing options that are easily availablerendering Business intelligence in reach for almost every
organization. So the question becomes: Does your company need a BI tool?

1. You have data, but no real information

While organizations have become masters of collecting data, they seem to be forgetting that data is not
the same as information. Information is data that has been converted into a meaningful and useful context
ready for onlookers to harvest insights. If youre lacking information, you may need help aggregating and
analyzing data into actionable information, and this is where the intelligence of a BI tool enters the
picture. The power of business intelligence is that it increases the ability to identify trends and issues,
uncover new insights, and fine-tune operations to meet business goalsthe value everyones been
looking for by collecting the data in the first place.

2. IT has become a bottleneck when you need a report

If your IT department controls all company data, getting reports may start to become cumbersome.
Creating reports without a BI software, especially complex reports or dashboards, requires someone with
a rich technical background and therefore forces all non-technical users to be reliant on IT.
When you need to repeatedly return to IT to tweak and edit reports, eventually theyll become a
bottleneck to getting your work done, and thats a clear sign its time to bring the data to the people in the
organization who actually benefit from analyzing data to meet business goalsthe business users. Any
solid BI tool with a clean, intuitive UI will allow business users to build their own reports as well as have
the flexibility to add or tweak any BI dashboard.

3. Your BI relies on spreadsheets, but your data is BIG

One of the first growing pains companies experience is when they hit Excels scalability wall. Excel is
often used as the lifeblood of a companys reporting needs, but Excel can become sluggish when reports
contain more data than Excel was designed to handle. In a growing business, it doesnt take long to
accumulate data far beyond Excels capacity, even if you dutifully clean and manage your data sets. All
youll be left to work with are desktop spreadsheets that are siloed and dont enable real-time data sharing
and updating.
Getting a unified, accurate view of the bigger picture with a BI tool that can easily mash up data from
multiple sources will make a coherent analysis of any amount of dataand fast. Basic tasks like creating
organizational plans, distributing and collecting information from different managers, consolidating
multiple spreadsheets, and debugging broken macros and formulas, will suddenly become a breeze.

4. You dread joining data from different sources

In todays business environment big data refers not only to the depth of big databases, but also the
breadth of mashing-up data coming from many different sources into a single coherent location. If you are
still running reports in different systems and trying to make sense of all the connections between the data
sets, you are working too hard and gaining just a fraction of the insight you could be gaining by using a BI
tool to cross data sources. Once you start using a BI tool to successfully work with multiple sources of
data, you will also uncover how easy it is to add additional data sources on the flyand then the options
of insightful mash ups will become endless.

5. A pie chart is supposed to deliver KPIs

Businesses are quickly learning the difference between reports and KPIs. Although reports are crucial as
a starting point for any analysis, KPIs give you the ability to display core metrics that will guide business
decisions. If your data cant tell you which of your business areas are doing well or struggling, or deliver
clear, actionable data, then youre missing a true advantage that Business Intelligence can provide, and
your little pie chart just wont cut it anymore.

Wrap Up
Every modern, data-driven organization needs some type of BI tool to help shift from running business on
intuition, to running it with intelligence. If you recognize any of the above pain points as your own, its time
to investigate how BI can help transform your data into information. When you do decide to invest in a BI
tool, make sure your organization prepares its BI strategy, executes

Types of Users and Familiarity

Proponents of Excel are those power users who can perform almost all Excel
analytical stunts. But, when it comes to less tech savvy frontline executives or other
personnel, mastering Excel would be a tough pursuit. Heres where modern BI tools
makes it easy for even the non-techie employees perform slicing and dicing, do some
data mash-ups with intuitive visualization features.

Timely re-configuration and processing

One of the areas where BI tools scores over Excel is providing real time data which is
outside the purview of Excel. The ability to connect directly to the databases and
heavy under the hood plumbing makes real time data monitoring easy and actionable.
Updating and re-configuring data also consumes a lot of time in Excel and sometimes
runs out of memory as well. Due to these inconsistencies working with Excel becomes
difficult. The amount of time taken to download data in Excels sheets and tons of
manipulation done in order to get relevant insights from disparate applications seems
quite a daunting task.

Visualization and Web access

Modern BI tools provide rich interactive visualization, web access to analytics as well
as new forms of interactive data visualization which still remains a far cry for Excel.

Error Probability
Mismanagement of data, corrupt files and inadequate security makes Excel more
vulnerable to errors. Even, power users who can build their own macros might still run
the risk of making hidden errors. Here, BI tools that are integrated with the databases
help in master data management and these tools being rigorously tested, come as a
saving grace for many users.

Complex Decision Making

When it comes to complex decision making that requires manager to access
information from various applications like SAP, CRM, ACCOUNTING etc. and then
downloading them to Excel sheets and performing analysis becomes a complex
procedure. On the other BI tools are far more sophisticated and can be easily
integrated with cross functional applications to provide meaningful insights without
banging heads on the Excel walls.

Complex Marketing Research and statistical analysis

In order to perform complex research and statistical analysis, Excels fails to leave a
mark as compared to the like of Spss and Sas. These softwares provide domain
driven data mash up capabilities and are far easy to use then Excel. Further,
managing unstructured data becomes difficult in Excel.

Expense
BI tools are more expensive then Excel, this is one area where Excel holds sway over
BI tools. For smaller organization Excel can help solve much of these BI challenges in
cost effective way, when it comes to big organization, Excel doesnt stand a chance
against mighty BI providers like COGNOS, QLIKVIEW, TABLEAUE and the like.

Size of data
Though Microsoft has made significant changes in Excel to enable power users to
manage large amount of data, Excel still falls short of space while handling large
amount of data. This is one major problem with Excel comparatively with BI tools that
come with high storage capacity to handle large data sets.

Computed measures KPIs, Etc.

Though Excel can perform complex analysis, when it comes to performing analysis to
measure KPIs using disparate data sources, BI tools are miles ahead.

Compliance
BI tools offer better compliance management capabilities than Excel. BI tools provide
much more reliable data for auditing various standards where quantification of
process and information flow is reliable and streamlined.