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Business Intelligence & Tools
Business Intelligence & Tools
Q.1 a. List the factors responsible for the increasing importance of BI in organisations.
b. What are the obstacles in Implementing BI in Organisations?
ANS
BI analytic tools, when used within a relationship marketing strategy, can regularly review
business performance trends and suggest actionable recommendations, enabling the
organisation to consistently optimise the strategic marketing approach. In this way,
ANS
The following are the main features of a financial reporting system:
Drag-and-drop report builder: This feature helps in creating sophisticated reports and
analysing them with ease. To generate a report, you need to select the desired items from a
menu, drag them onto a graphical workspace and choose appropriate formatting options.
Choice of dimensions in rows and columns: This feature enables you to easily design your
report. You just need to choose the right value of various dimensions, such as business unit,
department, region, product, customer, projects, metrics, assumptions and time period, and
drag them into the relevant rows and columns of the report builder.
Filters: These limit the data displayed in a report by filtering it by any dimension, such as a
specific sales territory, business unit or sales channel.
Parameters: These minimise the number of reports generated to record all the facts and
conclusions. Create a prompt for customising the report by giving users options to select the
appropriate time period, department, region, etc. The user security feature ensures that reports
can be run only for dimensions allowed for each user.
Annotations: This feature allows you to include collaborative explanations, comments and
questions on reports. You can include an ongoing thread that receives input from more than
one user or refer to specific data in a report or the entire report. These annotations can be
viewed either within the body of the report or as footnotes.
Automatic security/streamlined set of reports: This feature allows you to create a set of
standard reports for a group of users (e.g. P&L or Sales Detail). It ensures that specific
reports are visible only to the users authorised to access them.
Drill-down: This allows users to analyse the underlying data that contributes to a specific
total or rollup value through real-time drill-down capabilities.
Multi-version variance reporting: With this feature, you can compare actual, budget and
forecast data and display variances as values and/or percentages.
Graphs and charts: In addition to tabular formats, this feature facilitates viewing of reports
as graphs or charts.
Output formats: This feature helps to generate reports in different formats, such as HTML,
PDF or Excel.
Q.6 Discuss the various critical challenges that need to be overcome for BI to succeed
within an organisation
ANS
Business success is achieved with BI through easily accessible information. This access can
be best achieved with the help of precise and timely insight into the finances and customers
of an organisation as well as the state of the market. The true indicator of success in business
is when BI results in more profitability. Organisations achieve success in their business by
performing the following actions:
Making better decisions with confidence and speed
Optimising business operations
Shortening the product development cycle
Anticipating new opportunities and maximising the value of existing product lines
Focusing on marketing and overall supply chain with improved supplier and customer
relationship
For BI to succeed, the organisation must understand and analyse the challenges that come in
BI implementation. Usually, BI projects fail because of the following reasons:
Failure to understand that BI projects are cross-organisational business initiatives; they
differ from general stand-alone solutions.
Uninvolved business sponsors who take less interest in an enterprise BI implementation
Uninterested or unavailable business representatives
Lack of availability of skilled staff to work with BI tools
Absence of iterative development methods
Lack of methodology in the development of BI projects
Lack of clarity and analysis of business needs
Impact of dirty data on business profitability
Ignorance of the necessity and importance of metadata and its use
Reliance on unrelated tools and methods
Now, let us examine these challenges one by one in detail in the following section.
Cross-organisational collaboration
Usually, business initiatives focus on a particular area of business or on a limited set of
products. As a result of this narrow focus, organisations could not analyse the impact of the
data generated by the project and business operations.
Business sponsors
Strong business sponsors believe in the BI projects value and remove the obstacles to
champion it. A BI project requires support from a committed business sponsor within an
organisation. It generally fails to find that support.
Dedicated business representation
BI projects are technical in nature instead of being business-oriented. Thereason behind this
limitation is that most BI projects are run by IT project managers who have little knowledge
of business.
Availability of skilled team members
BI projects are significantly different from other projects as they lack concrete, well-defined
deliverables. Moreover, the technical and business skills required to implement a BI
application somewhat differ from other operational Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
projects.
BI application development methodology
To succeed, BI projects must follow a plan with well-defined objectives and methodologies.