Business Intelligence Blog

Strategic Business Intelligence and Analytics in Healthcare - WUSS 2009

2009-10-14T20:19:00.001+01:00

Strategic Business Intelligence and Analytics in Healthcare - Chitnavis - WUSS 2009

The Evolution of Business Intelligence Leadership - Part 3

2008-07-02T03:31:00.003+01:00

This is part of a series on The Evolution of Business Intelligence Leadership (click here to read the entire series).

The previous articles in this series alluded to the enterprise strategy and structure required for successful implementation of business intelligence. Is there a tried-and-tested one-size-fits-all strategy which will work? Unfortunately, the answer is NO. However, there is strong linkage between successful business intelligence projects and execution excellence. Most companies which are "good" at execution have similar characteristics. Interestingly, there is a timely article published in the Harvard Business Review June 2008 issue entitled "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution." I would strongly urge you to read the article carefully if you are considering deploying a business intelligence initiative. The article talks about what matters most to strategy execution. Counter to conventional wisdom, restructuring or motivating incentives are not the most popular methods. Here's the list of building blocks with % respondents in parentheses:

Information (54%)
Decision Rights (50%)
Motivators (26%)
Structure (25%)

Remarkably, the top 8 of the top 10 traits of organizational effectiveness fall in the first two categories – Information and Decision Rights. Isn't that all about business intelligence? See list below:

Rank	Organization Trait	Building Block	Strength Index
1	Everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which he or she is responsible.	Decision Rights	81
2	Important information about the competitive environment gets to headquarters quickly.	Information	68
3	Once made, decisions are rarely second-guessed.	Decision Rights	58
4	Information flows freely across organizational boundaries.	Information	58
5	Field and line employees usually have the information they need to understand the bottom-line impact of their day-to-day choices.	Information	55
6	Line managers have access to the merits they need to measure the key drivers of their business.	Information	48
7	Managers up the line get involved in operating decisions.	Decision Rights	32
8	Conflicting messages are rarely sent to the market.	Information	32
9	The individual performance-appraisal process differentiates among high, adequate, and low-performers.	Motivators	32
10	The ability to deliver on performance commitments strongly influences career advancement and compensation.	Motivators	32

Business Intelligence Performance Management Group

2008-05-23T05:22:00.002+01:00

I created an online group on the Scribd.com web site for knowledge sharing in the area of Business Intelligence Performance Management. If you are interested in the area, I highly recommend you join the group. There is a huge collection of useful documents. I will make every effort to keep the collection relevant and growing steadily.

Go to: Business Intelligence Performance Management Group

SAS - Business Intelligence

2008-05-18T02:24:00.000+01:00

It seems like SAS has been around forever. Even though the company has focused on the analytic community in the past, today, it is an entirely different company. I have seen its breadth of products grow. It has also started adopting open standards. Have a read of their Business Intelligence offering, read the following article:

brochure - Upload a doc

Enterprise Performance Management

2008-02-13T03:14:00.000Z

In my conversations with several professionals in the field of Business Intelligence & Performance Management I am observing an upsurge in the need for Performance Management. This article clarifies this new emerging area click here.

Wikipedia on Business Intelligence

2007-08-20T22:04:00.000+01:00

There are several resources on the 'net having information on Business Intelligence. Wikipedia (I love it) has its BI content at Wikipedia on Business Intelligence.

Business Performance Management

2007-05-11T05:23:00.000+01:00

I have already written about the challenge corporations face with dealing with Business Intelligence from an organizational structure perspective. Even though most of it relies heavily on the technology division for deployment it has to be a business initiative. BI has been straddling the fence between business and technology. I have been studying awareness and adoption of Business Performance Management (BPM) over the past several months. The increasing trend of business users and technology vendors deploying dashboard, scorecard, alerting and monitoring products is a sign of BI maturity.

BPM has always been the true promise of BI.

Arizona State University - MSIM Program

2006-08-17T01:51:00.000+01:00

I have been a guest speaker at the MBA and Master of Science in Information Management programs at the Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ the last few years. This program has a fantastic curriculum in Information Management. For more information, please go to MSIM Program and MBA Program.

I am extremely impressed by the foresight of the faculty for incorporating path-breaking Business Intelligence courses in the core curriculum for both programs. I can say with a high degree of confidence that this will empower business and technology leaders coming out of these programs with knowledge and tools to run organizations of the future.

What is Business Intelligence?

2006-08-11T06:37:00.000+01:00

Business Intelligence (BI) is a very broad term. The field of BI is evolving at a fast clip. BI is the use of technologies, hardware platforms, dedicated applications and processes that provide: (1) the ability to gather disparate sources of data, store and analyze them in order to synthesize valuable information for the purpose of helping the organization’s Management and end-users make sound tactical and strategic business decisions driving towards sustainable competitive advantage through activities including: (a) reporting (b) query functions (c) online analytical processing (d) statistical analysis (e) forecasting and (f) analytics. BI is also being used for performance management, through Dashboards, Scorecards, Monitoring and Alerting.

Business Intelligence

2006-08-05T00:05:00.000+01:00

It's time for Business Intelligence to take off. The journey from Decision Support Systems to esoteric Executive Information Systems to what we have in the form of Business Intelligence has been fascinating. This blog will help you keep up with the latest happenings in the field of Business Intelligence. I will present my analysis and perspectives on trends in BI affecting business and technology.

Enjoy!