Not to Offend, But You Are Thinking All Wrong About BI (Probably)

What’s the first step in building a data warehouse or a business intelligence system?  Defining the key performance indicators (KPIs), right?  Wrong!  KPIs are certainly great to know and can definitely apply when you’re developing BI applications like management dashboards.  But, BI is NOT about management dashboards or data warehouses or query and reporting or QlikView or Business Objects…

Business intelligence is simply about capitalizing on data that was captured for other purposes.

I was struck by this thought over the Thanksgiving holiday when speaking to my brother in law.  He’s an executive with an up-and-coming, private-equity-financed distributor.  One night, his CEO had an epiphany

We know what people buy but we don’t know if what people buy is generally correlated with other things that they buy, or should buy.  If we knew this, we could encourage folks buying one thing to also purchase its natural accompaniment.

For those of us who have been in the BI business for long enough, this is a take on the classic ‘beer and diapers’ data mining example (click here for more on this BI ‘fable’).

This is certainly a use of BI, of capitalizing on data assets but it doesn’t really work in the way that folks expect BI to work:

• It doesn’t really start with a definition of KPIs
• While it may use a data mining tool, it doesn’t use dashboards or query tools or other, common, reporting tools
• It may use a data warehouse but it may, also, just use data assembled for a one-time analysis

In any case, when thinking about BI, the vast majority of companies need to stop thinking about BI.  BI is not the point.  Doing something extraordinary is the point and, if using data assets gets you to extraordinary, then BI is the mechanism.

Quiz – November 2010: BI Industry Consolidation

Business Objects Insights from Dataspace – December 2008

TIP: USING THE USER RESPONSE AND REPLACE FUNCTIONS TO FORMAT YOUR REPORT

When you include prompts in your Web Intelligence report, you are making your report dynamic so that each time it is run, you can retrieve the data you need to see at that time without modifying the query. Did you know that you can use the User Response function to capture the value(s) you select and then include that in a report title so that you can easily know what data the report includes?

View the User Response and Replace Function example >>