Does your BI solution deliver real value to your organization?
Most BI solutions under deliver value to organizations, Steve Dine (@steve_dine), founder of Datasource Consulting, opines over at Information Management.
Dine makes a very good point about why organizations continue to struggle with the “value” factor – it stems from three areas: “lack of business involvement, long delivery cycles and poor data quality.”
Using some of Dine’s recommendations for value-driven business intelligence, we’re going to look at three ways to find real value in your BI program and solution.
Focus on value generation ahead of cost savings.
In his article, Dine explains that cost savings usually trumps value because of the level of “effort required to gather and integrate data across disparate source systems and user developed data stores.”
We couldn’t agree more on this point. Value should be the ultimate driver for any BI project. Pulling in data from disparate sources should be a simple process and the data being analyzed should help the user answer questions and deliver value to the organization.
Keep the customer and query context in mind in the development and design of the solution.
Dine calls for customer (business user) input and context for success in developing a BI solution. He notes, “Without context data is just data and is of little value to the customer. Without sufficient involvement by the customer in BI projects, it’s difficult to deliver value.”
Again, we concur with Dine. Data analytics or BI solutions should answer questions, lead to actionable insights and increase competitive advantage. In Dine’s discussion, he calls for the everyday users’ input for the development and design of the solution.
We think it goes a step beyond just input – the solution should be self-service and allow the user to dig into the data with the driving factor being context. That is to say, the user has a question and needs fast access to the right data. A BI solution should make that simple.
This was one of the leading drivers for growth in the market, according to the recently released Gartner BI Magic Quadrant. “As more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention and it’s increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle,” notes Gartner in a statement.
Focus efforts on value-added activities.
A BI solution “needs to incorporate the business into the design and development process, align across functional areas and eliminate unnecessary, non-value added activity,” Dine says.
Gartner’s 2013 market outlook highlights this need as BI moves beyond the traditional “descriptive analytics” into new lines of business such as “HR, marketing, social and so on. Gartner adds that “there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments.”
The bottom line according to Dine: “Every BI project and program is an investment that must deliver more value than what it costs to deliver.”
As it should be.
Next Steps:
- We invite you to review the entire Gartner BI Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.
- To learn more about the latest Spotfire capabilities that Gartner based its Gartner BI Magic Quadrant on, please view our complimentary webcast – What’s New with Spotfire 5.0.
- Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date on the latest insights and trends in business intelligence.
Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team
