|
|
Having the best information to do your job is a right, not a privilege.
Davide Hanan, MD of Qlikview South Africa looks at the benefits of information democracy to local business
Companies looking to capitalise on their BI investments are going to have to take a leaf out of the South African Constitution. While BI has significantly contributed to the accessibility of information, companies should take heed of the benefits of widely disseminating information and creating an information democracy.
Gartner's Business Intelligence summit held last year highlighted the need for information to be shared with the right people at the right time. The research house warned against creating information monarchies, where only the senior management has access to data. Nor, warned Gartner, should there be a state of information communism, where all staff have access to all information.
The benefits of reaching such a state ought to be very obvious. As competition grows ever fiercer, so does the attention to detail that businesses need to pay towards every aspect of their performance. By unlocking new user segments within the organization, companies can allow their workers and managers to cost-effectively move beyond spreadsheets to make decisions on the basis of correct facts and not guesstimates.
Furthermore, by deploying information to a larger group of people, companies will enable more staff with better insight into the organization and will therefore stand a much better chance of aligning focus and delivering on objectives.
While the ethos behind this is great, in the real world, implementation has been a challenge. A study by Gartner last year concluded that the biggest barrier to business intelligence deployment is a lack of user skills and knowledge of best practices. Since one cannot expect corporations to raise user skills at all levels, it is clear that the problem is not with the users, but rather with the tools provided. The challenge is for the BI vendors to make information accessible to the casual user by providing data in applications that the user is comfortable with.
Simplicity becomes the key word. Corporate buyers must purchase tools that offer less complicated querying techniques and basic but creative ways of presenting information gleaned from once intimidating BI and data warehousing tools. Instead of having to work with multiple reports, a factory floor manager needs a dashboard with a few simple gauges and graphs to determine the status of his production schedule, and a sales manager needs a small set of data views telling him how his team is performing each day. Users must simply be guided as to where to find the information, what to look for and what to do with the results.
Fortunately the smarter BI vendors are starting to deliver solutions for the users - as opposed to solutions for the IT department. These solutions can be deployed in days, are easy to use, and adapt to the needs of the business. As this trend evolves, mobility will become a key issue: users are not always in the same place as the ERP system or the central data warehouse. Instead of users going looking for information, the information will go to the user. This will be the next stage in BI, where people will be working with alert systems and the like using PDA's, mobile phones and BlackBerrys.
|
|
