The View From Here: Now is the Time

March 4, 2009

The premise of President Obama’s speech before Congress last week was that despite the nation’s great economic problems, there is no reason not to invest in health care, education and other important causes. Indeed, he said that this is exactly the right time: Our economic challenges can be turned into opportunities.

Hopefully, he was right. The same turning-lemons-into-lemonade theme applies to business intelligence. Clearly, organizations aren’t likely to be making big new investments. However, the financial crisis serves as a great opportunity to better leverage platforms that exist. In doing so, they will be proving their value and integrating themselves more deeply within the organization.

A number of articles speak to the basic point that now is the time to better exploit BI platforms. There is nothing in this BusinessWeek piece that BI professionals haven’t been saying for years. It is a great sign of acceptance, however, when a mainstream and influential publication pushes the message.

This piece at The BeyeNETWORK starts with a long and depressing litany of financial problems facing the health care industry. A lot of these issues, such as difficulty in getting reimbursed by insurers, exist no matter what shape the economy is in. However, they clearly are more important to confront in tough times. The piece goes into detail on how BI can aid in general administration and procurement, reimbursement and clinical care.

The same theme – that tools that are good in a healthy economy are great in one that is ill – underlies this Baseline piece on BI in the insurance industry. The writer says that three areas — BI/business analytics, enterprise risk management and virtualization — are three areas that are particularly important in the tough economy.

It really isn’t difficult to find similar commentary. It’s a simple idea: When times are tough, it is important to do more with the tools that are already installed or are easily available. BI professionals — vendors, corporate users, consultants and other members of the food chain — can use the crisis as a stepping stone to making BI more central to the ways in which organizations operate going forward.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence