More on BI Staffing

OK then, when last we left off we were wondering why some people believe IT shouldn’t be allowed ‘in the clubhouse’ when it comes to a BI Team.  Why would you want to do this?  It’s so sad to see them out there - all pocket-protectory with shirts buttoned to the top button and big glasses trying to peak in the windows.  It becomes clear why its necessary to take this position once you understand why BI is such a hot topic and what the objectives business has for the strategic application of business intelligence.

US based companies are on track to spend over 28 billion dollars on BI this year.  Today monster.com (or the job engine of your choice) has over 5,000 North American jobs posted in this field.  Why the demand?  BI programs grow out of a desire for better information.  Do you trust the numbers you see in your report?  Have you ever been in a meeting where different teams arrived with different results for the same metric?  Have you ever wanted information you knew was in your system, but couldn’t get at it?  BI can be driven by a desire for better organizational alignment.  Does it feel like everyone is on the same page?  Does leadership have a uniform understanding of corporate goals?  Do all teams have the correct priorities to drive the enterprise strategy?  Scorecards and strategy maps are pretty common tools for driving a common enterprise vision to address this need.  They provide fact-based tools that help leaders articulate, communicate, prioritize and adjust corporate strategy to everyone within an organization.  Whether business intelligence is tactical (ground up) or strategic (top down) the focus has shifted from data management and information delivery to supporting competitive advantage.  As early as 2002 Price-Waterhouse-Coopers recognized that businesses which use information effectively establish themselves as leaders in their industry.  Companies face tough competition and are driven to make better use of existing assets, to be lean.  Making better use of your data asset can drive competitive advantage with measurable and fast return-on-investment and is at the heart of the spending and hiring in the BI space.

If you were to speak to Gartner, TDWI (The Data Warehouse Institute) or any recognized BI expert they would give you a definition for BI that goes something like this, “The process and technology required to turn data into information and information into knowledge that drives profitable business action.”  This will immediately be followed by something about about data warehousing and decision support tools.  They may give you exciting examples of applied BI which might include predictive analytics being used to determine the best price, corporate behavior, future sales or the best person to hire.  You might learn about data visualization as a powerful tool that provides an engine to fuel fast feedback loops creating more agile execution and leadership.  Data mining that will increase revenue per marketing dollar spent.  Performance management tools that transform your annual planning process from thousands of hours to hundreds of hours and provide much faster re-forecasting.  Vendors are now slapping BI on any data related product for obvious reasons.  At the end of the day these examples and vendor pronouncements represent applications - tools.  Business intelligence is a pattern of organizational behavior that needs to be understood, nurtured, sustained and grown.  It is not technology.  This pattern of behavior boils down to providing trusted and usable data to the right business people with the right experience equipped with the right analytical tools that allow them to either drive sales or reduce costs.  It is business driven, business focused and business lead.  Fostering a fact-based decision making culture across an organization and aligning it to support and drive competitive advantage defines the practice of BI.

Practice is an important word.  It means to pursue professionally.  The inference being that business intelligence isn’t technology.  Successful BI programs are about taking effective action based on the better use of information.  Technology helps BI just as it helps in many areas like accounting, replenishment and HR.  Put differently, technology is the race car.  It’s  very cool, but without a driver or a race what good is it?   (The obvious exception being that the race car helps you feel better about turning 40!)  If you want to win you need the car, the driver, the race and a team.  Think about this in terms of what it takes to use information more effectively than your competition.  In this context the off-hand comment that IT isn’t part of your BI team makes sense.  I don’t a agree with it, but there’s a good reason to put it in those terms.  A lot (I mean a LOT) of BI implementations fail.  A part of that can be attributed to taking a project based approach, particularly if it is driven by IT.  The success of a project is determined by delivering some new capability like a data warehouse, a decision support tool or a dashboard.  BI is about what comes next.  The information is in the data warehouse and executives have it in their dashboards.  So what?  The million (in some cases billion) dollar question is what then?

This is why the well-respected-really-smart-guy-who-carries-a-briefcase-and-lives-more-than-50-miles-away guy said IT isn’t part of your BI Team.  They can’t answer the “what’s next” question.  They can’t motivate action across the organization that drives profits.  The reality is that you can build it, but they won’t come.  They’re the horse not drinking at the water.  Who are they?  The folks you need to execute.  The gal in front of the customer and the folks building your product.  Educating, enabling and motivating them to take action is the mandate of the BI team.  The really interesting part is getting ‘that’ team put together.  The group who can make this happen and that group is where your practice of BI lives.  So who is that?

Whoaa, I’ll put the breaks on here.  This blog is like me getting up on two soapboxes!  I can post more about this if anyone’s interested.  If no one comments I’ll move onto something else (maybe a discussion of the diversionary tactics used by toddlers to avoid bedtime.  “I’m thirsty.”  “I have to go potty.”  “I don’t like the dark.”)

Tags: Analytics, Business Intelligence, Consulting, Michigan, West Michigan