Imagine driving a car without any dashboard or instruments; nothing to tell you how fast you are going with a speed camera around the corner; nothing to tell you how low your fuel tank is. Or nearly as bad, there is a 30 minute lag on what your dials tell you. Speeding fines and breakdowns would be inevitable. And yet, many organisations do just that, or at least base decisions on out of date or erroneous information.
Decision makers driving their organisations have typically relied on accounts or performance data originating in a piece of software, often held in the depths of a server in an IT department that requires someone to extract content into a spreadsheet, manipulate it and then forward it to someone else to interpret. Often these links become very convoluted with a great deal of interpretation. In such a process, lags and errors are all too often endemic. But to be fair, in the past there has been little choice.
Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help an organisation gain a better understanding of its performance. BI technologies, one of which is Microsoft PerformancePoint, now part of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 platform, it provides historical, current, and predictive views of operations. It is a decision support system, using data from automated processes, forms, tables and databases presented in a pertinent and relevant way. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs and Digital dashboards incorporated into SharePoint homepages perhaps in the form of traffic lights and graphs can alert managers in a timely way to issues arising in their organisation and help them navigate around them.
So much of the information business leaders need is already in Microsoft applications and databases that using SharePoint and PerformancePoint to automatically locate, combine, manipulate and present the information in a pertinent way is by far the easiest and most cost effective way to provide business intelligence to the people who need it.
There is an endless list of practical examples of the ways BI can help organisations; from managing cash flow, retail sales, compliance, bed utilisation, security and so on and so on. Simple examples could be an indicator screen optionally held on the top corner of the relevant managers monitor with bank account data and currency and treasury links integrated into debtors and creditors to provide a rolling cash flow as a part of a digital dashboard that incorporate hour by hour sales data, weekly and monthly trends with historical comparison and stock turnover with perhaps the top and bottom ten sellers. For a hospital it could be bed usage with a forecast based on Consultant appointments extracting trend data based on previous periods indicating potential ward overloads by red, amber and green traffic lights.
Every organisation has key performance indicators or critical success factors that can be measured to help achieve an optimal performance. Those indicators, just as on the dashboard of a car, can show what is working well and what isn’t. Using BI technologies, the information can be presented in a very cost effective way at the right time to the right person so that they can do something about it, before it is too late!