Show me the Money: Business Casing for Business Intelligence
The 7th Annual Business Intelligence Summit is being held in Auckland on the 24th and 25th of February. The summit is targeted at understanding how to deliver maximum value from Business Intelligence and Analytics.
David Bloch, our Business Intelligence Practice Lead will be presenting a session on "Show me the Money: Business Casing for Business Intelligence".
For the last decade or more, Business Intelligence has tried to build one source of the truth and provide clear robust reporting from that single view. This capability was targeted at providing information on performance at a headline level suitable for making business decisions on.
Our BI world is changing quickly
- Recent technological advancements in the ability to store and manage large tracts of transactional data (aka Big Data) give rise to new reporting capability.
- That same technology enables data sets external to our organisations to be accessed in real time (i.e. Google Maps).
- New and powerful way of visually representing information is giving rise to much easier to understand reporting
- Reporting tools are now able to be used by Staff/Customers/Partners at low cost over the internet and with good functionality.
- BI and Analytics skills are hard to find and costly due to the surge in demand for this capability
- This new level of insight into an organisations performance allows some competitive differentiation (at this time) but it will soon be a must-have to stay competitive.
- The use of this new insight will be made across the entire organisation, how will your current BI capability change to meet this greater internal demand?
So when is the right time to invest in new capability? Let's look at the business case benefits.
In order to provide a clear rationale for investment we must consider four key areas
- Tangible Benefits
- Intangible Benefits
- Alignment to Business Strategy
- Change Management to Business Processes
Tangible Benefits
Tangible Benefits are ones that exist on the surface, they can easily be quantified within the business case and provide almost all of the early benefits of the investment within Business Intelligence.
- Base-line Business Intelligence investment benefit areas.
- Consolidation of servers and licensing for the technology stack,
- Standardisation of weekly reports reducing repetitive manual work.
- Standardisation of ETL processes to remove manual solutions
- Consolidation and re-use of BI Data integration solutions
- Removing costly MS-based reporting tools for a central web-based capability.
- Next generation BI Analytics benefit areas
- Product sales performance insight through campaign and sales channel analytics
- Product cost performance insight through support channel and supply chain analytics.
- Improved customer intimacy (CS and NP scores) through 360 degree customer view from internal interactions plus external channels plus social media, leading to improved market share.
- Improved Brand management through support channels and social media leading to improved market perception and market share. (Also reduces brand damage risks.)
- Much improved self-service delivery through improved customer intimacy, visual performance reporting and geo-spatial context.
Intangible Benefits
Intangible benefits are below the surface and relate more so to an efficient business that becomes truly data driven in the way they make decisions, change their operating model and evolve their business processes. These impacts provide a longer term return on investment for the business.
While they are hard to quantify, many research projects have been done across industry verticals to show the uplift that businesses have when they become intelligence-led.
Alignment to Business Strategy
A key failing of Business Intelligence projects is that they become focused on technology and not on the business and its strategies. Failing to align your business intelligence strategy to the overall business strategy can erode benefits and contribute to more cost within the project due to refactoring of your data warehouse and reporting layer.
Attaching key performance indicators to each strategic goal can allow Business Intelligence to measure and predict the likelihood of success, contribute information that will help projects run more efficiently and identify failing projects quicker. This will lower the cost and likelihood of failure within the business investment programme.
Change Management to Business Processes
Business process change is a key outcome of a successful BI capability and therefore must be considered as a key part of improving or rolling out a BI capability.
The BI environment may find an operational inefficiency within the supply chain, or come up with a better shipping algorithm to save on distribution costs, this benefit can only be realised if the business changes their processes to take note of the learnings.
We will discuss how to best integrate these changes,
Summary
The benefits of Business Intelligence can be found in many areas however true business value can only be derived from a business intelligence platform when business process and decision making actively change on the basis of new insights.
