Business Intelligence #1 priority CIOs

Just like 2006, market research firm Gartner cited BI as a top agenda item for CIOs in 2007. For the second year in a row Business Intelligence tools emerged as the number one technology priority in Gartner's annual survey of 1.400 CIO's worldwide. Predicting a 10,5% growth of the business intelligence market in 2007.

"CIOs will need to concentrate on information as a leverage point to enhance efficiency, increase effectiveness and support competitiveness," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. "This also corresponds to the continued importance of business intelligence in 2007. As such, CIOs will continue to be responsible for IT — the mechanism. They can further play a greater role in leveraging information — the understanding that drives performance and innovation."

CIOs can create enterprise leverage when a focused effort produces significant results for the enterprise and its strategy. This means that CIOs need to exploit new approaches to transform the business. One of the sources of enterprise leverage CIOs can draw on is information: Gaining the business insight and understanding required to act in a changing environment. Only 36 percent (!) of CIOs believe that management is using the right information to run the business.

And then what about non-management? The people that run the operational business? Do they have easy access to all the right and up-to-date information? If the knowledge workers within your company are bogged down, hunting and gathering information, then the whole company could be bogged down.

Do you feel poor information management or access is limiting your organization in driving true business effectiveness and innovation? Then drop a line...

Loosing a quarter of your time?

A recent Accenture study revealed: Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs. And when they do find it, it is often wrong!
This is completely in line with a report from the Butler Group already discussed in a previous post The business value of Operational Intelligence. They also concluded a typical 'knowledge worker' spends 2 hours a day searching for information. So things are in line here...

Pfff... Isn't this shocking when you think of this? Especially considering the over a trillion dollars spent each year globally on IT, aimed at improving efficiency, saving costs, enabling growth, etc. So what about now really enabling your staff to concentrate on what they do best and helping them to navigate this rapidly expanding sea of information?

Now Accenture furthermore also mentions:

• Three out of five managers miss information that might be valuable to their jobs because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it.
• Two out of five managers accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.
• Over half the managers feel that less than half of the information they receive is valuable.
• Three out of five managers claim that having to go to numerous data sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs.
• Almost two out of five managers feels that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data.

And there's even much more! Combined with the ever increasing amount of gathered and stored information, it's not strange to find out that for instance 40 percent of customer service managers said that the most difficult aspect of managing information for their job is going to numerous sources of information.

So how's this then for a value proposition?
Operational Intelligence: helping you save valuable time and free up the hours currently wasted every day by tracking down relevant information for your job.

Operational Intelligence augments Business Intelligence

Below are some excerpts from an article by AMR Research (Operations Intelligence Augments Business Intelligence):

Business Intelligence leverages the data captured in ERP systems

When asked, business users will grudgingly concede that they have realized some value from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) investments. They have done so by standardizing global processes such as order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, and facilitating cost reductions through arduous business re-engineering efforts and major reorganization around shared services. However, these same business users get much more animated about the ability to analyze their business performance globally. In fact, the ability to analyze is always at or near the top priority of virtually every spending survey AMR Research conducts. Being able to quickly show how they can "slice and dice" all the data captured in their ERP systems leads to a much better understanding of myriad metrics such as which products are selling in each part of the world, average selling price, best- performing salespeople, contribution of each product to profitability, and other sales and financial performance measures.

Most Business Intelligence Looks In The Rearview Mirror

Running today's global manufacturing enterprise on ERP and traditionally implemented BI is like driving down the New Jersey Turnpike in reverse at 65 mph using only the rearview mirror. ERP architectures are optimized for transactional efficiencies rather than real-time reporting. In many cases, BI platforms must go through a time-consuming "extract, transform, load" process to turn ERP data into intelligence that can readily generate standard reports and facilitate the slicing and dicing that allows business users to analyze performance rather than spend 70% to 80% of their time collecting data, as they used to before ERP and BI. If you are always looking in the rearview mirror, you miss what is going on around you right now. That is a recipe for disaster in today's highly dynamic business environment. By the time you detect an operational problem in BI, you have already made poor-quality products and missed orders.

Checklist: How to decide if you need a business intelligence/operations intelligence solution

• Are critical business and operational data available to all rather than a select few?
• Do you know with certainty which customers/products/channels are most profitable?
• Do you know which suppliers have the best on-time delivery performance?
• Does your firm have complete visibility of manufacturing key performance indicators across the full enterprise?
• Can you effectively sense and respond to dynamic changes in demand and/or supply?
• Is there a definitive source of business and operational data that everyone uses?
• Can you use information today to predict performance tomorrow?
• Is the right data available at the right place at the right time?
• Are your real-time data needs being met today?

If you answered "no" to any of these, then it would make sense for you to evaluate a business intelligence/operations intelligence solution.

The business value of Operational Intelligence?

A month or so ago I started looking for additional background info on the business value of Operational Intelligence. I wanted to know for instance how much time the average 'knowledge worker' looses each day, when using inefficient ways of looking for information. In October 2006, Butler Group published a report on exactly this subject: Enterprise Search and Retrieval

Apparently organizations waste 10% of the salary bill when searching for information! So there's an immediate savings opportunity... However, my gut feel tells me that the biggest impact is not in efficiency but in improved quality and speed of decisions. However I'm still looking for metrics to support this. Please leave a comment if you know of any related research.