Why bother with Business Intelligence?

March 20, 2008 · Filed Under BI

The ROI for BI software can be calculated once you have nailed down the affected business processes and the specific tasks that business users will be doing. But before getting to that point, even before the project scoping has begun, the question needs to be asked: why bother? In a nutshell, here are my arguments:

Leverage the investment in ERP or CRM software. Looking at transactional data is not usually helpful, but looking at it in the aggregrate is invaluable. Business analysts and executives can identify trends, see a snapshot of the business at a particular point in time, or isolate the data for a specific business line or geography. Enterprise software often ships with some canned reports. This is a good starting point, but the reports are usually too generic to be useful for very long. A BI solution can make it easy to build customized reports, or even let the power users create their own ad hoc queries.
Increase the ROI of the disk storage solution. The cost of disk storage is decreasing, but the amount of data is increasing faster. BI gives another purpose to the data, thus increasing its value to the business.
Report on information from disparate systems. Data resides in many places and in many different formats. BI software can combine the data, aggregate it, and allow the creation complex reports that otherwise would not be possible.
Avoiding spreadmarts. Dumping everything into a spreadsheet is not maintainable in the long term. Valuable corporate data should be easy to access and to understand.
Expose data to customers in a relevant and controlled fashion. With increased emphasis on transparency and self-service, exposing customer data to the customers themselves can drive customer satisfaction and become a marketing tool. Many customers would value knowing, in the aggregate, the cost, the time or the location of their transactions.