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By Carel Badenhorst, Product Manager Business Intelligence at SAS Institute South Africa
SORTING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF IS KEY TO DOING BETTER AND REAL BI
Years ago we felt no need for server farms, no need for off site storage and no need to bother with keeping our data. But times have changed and data translated into information is king. Today there are global corporate databases which are starting to reach one petabyte (a quadrillion bytes) making it near impossible to manage these reams of data let alone analyse it for use.
Enter Business Intelligence (BI), the effective application of which is enabling the corporate world to make better and more informed business decisions for the sake of the customer, based on the needs of the customer. But with the data space itself evolving the nature of the BI landscape is also changing, and being able to analyse a couple of graphs and crunching an attractive pie chart out of it, is just not analytics and even less is it real BI.
THE ARCHITECTURE IS CHANGING
Being able to analyse your data effectively takes more than just collecting, storing and sorting of data and there is a checklist of things which need to be in place before these pieces of the BI puzzle start forming the picture you want. Do you understand what BI is, if so have you mapped what you want from it? If these bits are in place we can start wading though the other parts of the landscape including, and in no particular order, software applications, technology, data, process, incentives, skills, corporate culture, needs and company buy in.
The instantaneous need of data and information is required by management, departmental heads, sales people, analysts, and company statisticians, and this information needs to be tapped into quickly, reliably and accurately. The luxury of taking days to analyse a simple data thread are long gone.
MAKING IT AVAILABLE
The means through which we access this data can now no longer be limited to the view of only a few chosen ones. Data through BI processing, needs to be accessible through traditional reports, analysis tools, dashboards, and an entire office suite, whether this be spreadsheet, powerpoint or email.
In recent research conducted by consulting firm Accenture, organisations admitted that the need to access data through a variety of channels was highlighted as critical, as more and more companies admitted to using BI tools and in turn analytics - to build "competitive advantage". In the report companies admitted that this included the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models and decision making. In addition to which Accenture's High Performance Business research found a powerful link between organisations with pronounced analytical orientations and market out-performance.
STEP-BY-STEP
If we were to take a step-by-step approach to building a better BI architecture then it could be simplified into six key elements, which could help IT executives leverage analytics:
- Data management
- Transformation tools and processes
- Data repositories
- Analytical tools and applications
- Presentation tools and applications
- Operational processes
KEY TO SUCCESS
In anything the real key to success is having the right people supporting a project. Many BI projects fail before they take off because their intention was to merely access a small stream of data, instead of looking at the bigger picture. A proper enterprise BI solution crawls through your organisation and collects its sources from every nook and cranny, and more importantly it was given permission to do this by the big wigs.
Should top management help IT plan and deploy a robust technical environment for BI, the sky is truly the limit. Then the aforementioned elements will merely aid in aligning business strategy, corporate culture and management style with the end goals for competitive advantage.
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