Benefiting from Business Intelligence (BI) systems

Business Intelligence (BI) technology offers organizations improved access to data and a variety of numeric and graphical analysis tools to deliver advanced opportunities for insight into the behavior of customers and organizations. Essentially, BI systems provide processed data and quantitative evidence to facilitate the decision-making process. Without a doubt BI systems provide a tremendous advance in the ability of organizations to harness data. However, deploying the technology is only a small part in achieving concrete results. There are still several individual and organizational elements that need to be aligned in order to maximize the benefits BI technology delivers.

The Value of Insight

BI technology merely enables increased access and improved presentation of data. However, data by itself is of no value. Individuals must apply their individual analysis skills, that is, gain insight based on the data. This new insight must then drive decisions about the most appropriate actions to take based on the data. This is critical because insight without action is of no value to an organization.

One key organizational challenge is the way in which the insight gained from BI systems is used to make decisions. There are many assumptions about decision-making processes and abilities that need to be addressed. For example, it is often assumed that:

• People use quantitative evidence to make decisions. This is not always true.
• Individuals understand the impact of how an issue is framed impacts data interpretation.
• Individuals know how to interpret the data and apply the insight into their jobs
• Users are able to avoid information overload and use BI system effectively.

TriTuns Innovation helps clients understand the fundamental issues around decision-making and how to use this knowledge to improve BI system use.

Data-Driven Decisions Require High Quality Data

It is imperative that data used to drive decision making is complete, accurate, and reliable. Even the best decision-making processes will yield tragic results if the data is suspect. The saying “garbage in = garbage out” has never been more true then when implementing BI technology.

In addition to having high quality data, BI system users need to understand the nature, source and extent of the data on which analysis is made. Each individual piece of data reflects a snapshot at a given point in time. Altering the scope of data may dramatically change the insight gained from the system.

TriTuns Innovation helps clients address data quality issues as well as understand how data manipulation can impact the use of BI systems.

Translating Decisions into Action

Insight and decisions must translate into action in order to achieve desired results. Without action all insight gained from BI systems is merely academic. The challenge is that many organizational affect the key transition from decision to action. Organizational structure, office politics, culture, reward systems, personal motivations, risk aversion, and financial constraints are just a few of the items that impact the ability of an individual tot take action from insight.

TriTuns Innovation helps your organization address the factors that enable decisions to become action. We utilize a variety of techniques to identify and understand the factors driving your organization performance, and work with you to align the forces that impact your ability to use your BI systems to achieve measurable results.