Browse > Home / Interviews / For New BI Tools, Communications is a Two-Way Street

For New BI Tools, Communications is a Two-Way Street

January 28, 2009

Savvy IT and Finance departments recognize that BI and Performance Management will continue to make businesses smarter, especially during these difficult economic times. This perspective propels IT and Finance to continue to partner with the business on BI and Performance Management initiatives to address the growing demand for more personalized, relevant information and streamlined decision-making. Managers in these departments understand that the insights gleaned can help their organization to make the leap from ‘data-rich/information poor’ to truly capitalize on their collective “intelligence” for sustainable competitive advantage.

Listen to the Podcast:

However, for too long internal communications between IT as the decision-makers and deployers of BI and performance management software and the business departments that use the actionable insights gleaned has been a one-way information supply chain – running from IT or Finance source to business user target.

Today, with modern BI and performance management solutions, IT and Finance have the ability to engage the business in a two-way dialog with their information. This dialog centers on know-how about performance information that is captured by the business and then incorporated into the back-end systems run by IT or Finance. It aligns information to the way the business wants to view and understand it – according to business terms that are aligned to the stringent standards IT and Finance have to comply with.

This dialog applies whether it is a sales manager wanting to reflect a new sales organization and see their numbers, or a marketing manager wanting to capture a new attribute of customers in a loyalty index, or a financial analyst looking to define next year’s cost center.

Legacy IT and Finance systems don’t enable this today. Either the business changes quicker than IT and Finance can respond or the infrastructure can reflect. Or, the operational systems in place today simply lack the ability to capture and store additional business attributes or future structures scenarios.

This challenge often leaves the business resorting to spreadsheets – creating manual, error-prone data sets that don’t align, can’t be audited and don’t provide IT and Finance with any enterprise visibility on performance. Similarly, the challenge can make IT and Finance departments retreat behind static, canned reports delivered by rote without business input on design or content.

Enter BI and Performance Management software. In particular, BI and performance management software for dimension management. This is a relatively new area that opens up that one-way street of information to provide two-way traffic between IT/Finance and the business, without compromising any existing standards that are in place.

This type of BI and performance management software lets IT/Finance and the business collaborate on the creation, review and approval of changes through workflow – where each business person plays a specific role with responsibility on particular domain area of the business so everyone can work together to create common views with common purpose. These viewpoints can then be synchronized and shared across an organization’s performance management framework. .

Now, instead of having a disconnected spreadsheet mess from the business, IT and Finance benefit with increased enterprise visibility and participation in the process - receiving an approved set of requirements on how the information should be organized from the business perspective.

This type of collaboration between IT/Finance and the business is essential in today’s fast-changing market where conditions change on a dime and decisions need to be fact-based on relevant, timely and trusted information that is consistent across the enterprise.

Harriet Fryman is the Business Unit Executive for BI and Platform for IBM.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Interviews 

Comments

One Response to “For New BI Tools, Communications is a Two-Way Street”

  1. Mark on February 5th, 2009 4:19 am

    Business Intelligence with Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an infrastructure that makes it easy for decision-makers to access information anytime, anywhere. People can get up-to-date information where they work, collaborate, and make decisions, whether it’s on the desktop or over the Web.

    There is more information on Business Intelligence solution at http://www.nsynergy.com/Products/SharePoint/Pages/Business_Intelligence.aspx or please mail to info@nsynergy.com

Got something to say?





CA Anti-Virus Plus 2008