BI’s role in the intelligent enterprise

When in charge of making all the right decisions for their company, more executives than ever before like to consult their business intelligence (or “BI”) reports for added insight regarding the current, past and more importantly, future events.

The use of BI applications and tools among executives has been growing over the past decade and depending on who you ask, roughly 25% of all workers use on flavor or another of BI in the course of their work.

While this might sound encouraging, BI’s use is nowhere near as widespread as the major business intelligence vendors would have you believe.

In fact, the BI tools themselves are partially to blame for the somewhat lackluster adoption level currently observed. Add company cultures that encourage gut-and-feel decision makin to the mix and BI software, whatever the flavor, will have a hard time getting past the security guard’s booth!

To make matters worse, many companies tolerate information hoarding or, alternatively, allow IT department administrators to zealously lock away data that should, by all means, be made available to more employees for —you guessed it— basic to advanced BI applications.

The value proposition for BI might be obvious for the vendors but countless executives still don’t understand the advantages of business intelligence software over standard ERP system reports and, in some case, manual spreadsheets.

Executives and employees alike should take another look at BI tools out there in order to reap value from data to deliver, among other things, best-in-class service, boost revenue and increase operating efficiencies.

The future seems to belong to those who best understand the strategic importance of the proverbial gold mine hidden in their hard drives, waiting to be analyzed and used in creative, new ways, BI-style.

Tags: bi, business intelligence, data, information, spreadsheets, value, revenue

One Response to “BI’s role in the intelligent enterprise”

1. Will Oracle’s Fusion Suite be released soon? | Beep.Name says:

   January 27, 2009 at 2:26 pm

   [...] are likely to adopt this new suite rather than pass the opportunity to get a suite comprising business intelligence (BI) from Oracle’s Hyperion integration. Expect Retek and ProfitLogic acquisitions to add even [...]