One of the hottest topics in the business world in the past five years has been business intelligence (BI). However, many of our clients are still asking: What is BI and what will it do for me? Following is a little more information that should shed some light on these questions, as well as comments on some important issues related to BI from a less technical perspective. First of all, at Novus, we prefer the following definition of BI.

Business intelligence uses knowledge management, data warehouse[ing], data mining and business analysis to identify, track and improve key processes and data, as well as identify and monitor trends in corporate, competitor and market performance. (Source: BetterManagement.com)

In every successful enterprise, profit or non-profit, managers have to make decisions that involve risk. Given the growing complexity of business decisions, managers need access to all the accumulated knowledge affecting the enterprise, which comes both from internal and external sources. Further, despite often having huge amounts of data available, many companies still cannot generate the intelligence they need, or generate it fast enough, to act on. As a result, organizations continue to miss opportunities – or worse, incur huge losses – due to uninformed decisions and misguided strategies. From our perspective, data management and business analytics may be the most important new technological process a company can acquire because these provide the highest and most visible payback, when implemented correctly.

Business intelligence starts with data management. Understanding what data are captured, manipulated and stored is the key to being successful in retrieving any information from the massive amounts of data that surround us. Business analytics provide managers with the tools to find out what happened in the past, what is going on today and what will happen in the future. There are software tools that cover all these functions, but we don’t want to focus on the technology in this issue of our newsletter.

Instead, there are three other elements that are critical for the success of any business intelligence initiative: people, organization culture and processes. People are, in our opinion, the most important factor in achieving success. People are the ones building and using the systems; without their buy-in, any project will fail. Training is a major component of any business intelligence system, starting from the basic pivot tables in Excel spreadsheets to the most comprehensive reporting and forecasting tools sold by major software vendors. People need to understand the benefits of these new systems for them and their clients – people are not resistant to change; people are resistant to poorly explained changes. Our experience shows us that employees love everything that makes their life easier, especially their ability to make informed, low-risk decisions.

The second factor is the organization culture. Strongly linked to people, this is defined by the leaders of the organization. It’s their role to support new initiatives and improve the existing processes in order to be more competitive. Good leaders not only understand the need for timely information; they also work closely with employees to define the organization’s information needs and make sure that proper processes are in place for having that information at their fingertips.

This brings us to a third component for success; defining business processes from how a sale is made to the development of a new product. This will help tremendously in the process of identifying data and information needs. Of course, in different industries, and for different size companies, some processes are more complex than others. Organizations that are ISO certified already know that a significant effort is required from everyone internally in order to clearly describe these processes. It can take months to understand, streamline and assess clear responsibilities among internal departments for all these processes.

We present this information in the hope that more companies in Nova Scotia will embrace business intelligence concepts to become more competitive. While companies with more data (i.e., large companies) have more resources and can crunch more numbers, it is important to understand that even small companies with two or three employees could, and should, take advantage of business intelligence tenets. For example, there is no organization that does not need to know who its best and worst customers are; how much money is brought in by respective products, geographical areas and different account managers; and what is happening with repeat customers.

Novus has tremendous expertise working with small businesses, large corporations and not-for-profit organizations in helping them adopt the best tools and processes for making good decisions, fast. We work closely with our clients, listening to them and proposing solutions that fit every budget. For more information about conducting a business intelligence assessment of your organization, executive mentoring or discussing your reporting and analytical needs, please contact Alex Filimon at afilimon@novusconsulting.com or by phone at 902-489-2665.

For best results:

1. always give a firm deadline;
2. for a small project, extend the deadline by a day or two at the end;
3. for a large project, extend the deadline by 4 or 5 days; when that is up, extend it another day or two.

Remember, the last few days are when the most important knowledge is often synthesized. Don’t see yourself short; the value of results can often be doubled in the final critical stages. Remember too, consultants are often dealing with the unknown and it is often difficult for them to anticipate the problems they’ll face and the time involved, at the start of a project. A little leeway on deadlines is often all that is needed to produce top results. If you are under a deadline yourself, build the above tips into your schedule.