Optimizing BI

IT departments do not necessarily need to buy new software to meet the demands of the business areas

IT managers have relied as ever in business intelligence (BI) tools, in order to achieve operational savings and focus on product strategy.

IT departments, however, do not necessarily buy new BI software or create data warehouse to meet these demands. Instead, should focus on optimizing the tools already implemented in the company.

As a way to help CIOs in this effort to use more efficiently the BI already installed, following seven experts and executives tips:

1 – Consolidate your tools

“In general, people have more tools than they need, which can shift the focus,” says Anthony Abbattista, the Consulting. Also according to Deloitte it, organizations end up having different groups of people doing similar analyzes with different tools, which creates unnecessary confusion.

So Abbattista recommends a systems consolidation. “Employ the minimum number of tools needed to do the job,” he advises.

2 Configure the solution for business

IT departments still fall into the trap of putting the focus to the technology instead of creating models able to respond to changing business needs, says Nick Millman, senior director of Accenture Information Management Services. Thus, he believes that the CIO has to work together with the business areas to create the right processes for the extraction of information.

To begin, you must have a clear vision of how the information will generate value for the organization, advises Millman. “Think of the interventions in business you expect to get the BI tools. Understand where will the benefit to the business and then configure the tools and processes. “

3 – New markets call for new types of data

According to Bill Hostmann, Gartner vice president, many organizations are undergoing a major change in strategy: products of high value to low-cost products offers. However, companies can not compete in the low cost market need to find a way to climb the value chain – and to get there, are using BI tools.

4 – Add data to the data warehouse

When it comes to data warehouse, the current economic recession is a great opportunity for the organization to review what is chasing and put more of business operations data in the funnel in order to get additional savings. But you must be very selective as to which will be added, guide experts.

Add call center data, web logs or other sources. The question that companies need to do in these times is: “What do I have that I can put into the data warehouse at a relatively low cost?”

5 – Use the best data that has

In some cases, “do more with less” is just a matter of getting data that users already have and present them in a more useful way. In most companies, about 80 percent of information is unstructured and therefore not available to any standard system database management. This implies this fact? Basically that much of the business information, including Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs and emails, is not available to analysts. Look at them more closely. Recompile all this content to an enterprise search system, a multi-purpose process that combines different types of information and integration techniques, can be a viable way.

6 – Keep your lean models

Make sure you have a clear and consistent data model before bringing new data for your data warehouse or import them from some other part of the business. The new data have to be in accordance with the model adopted. Often, sources of information or different business sections are added to the data warehouse without sufficient attention to the way the data are modeled. Result: it is difficult to make sense of reports or business information that involve more than one section.

Financial and customer service, for example, might be modeled in totally different ways. Accenture, says Millman, spends much time helping customers re-architect the way to store data.

7 – Help users understand the data, not just the tools

No point in increasing the number of users with access to BI tools if they do not know use them. But this is not the biggest problem when it comes to educating the user. The trend has been a front end simpler and more intuitive. And undoubtedly helped dashboards that.

Full article: http://cio.com.br/

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