Understand Your Business, Understand Your BI

Irving "Bubba" Tyler made an interesting observation at the Symposium: "You cannot talk about business intelligence without talking about collaboration and knowledge management."

The former CIO of Quaker Chemical suggested that if a company is serious about BI, it will develop its own way of using it. For instance, Quaker relies heavily on BI to compete in its sector. Harrah's Entertainment is equally committed to BI, but approaches it very differently. "This is really about understanding your business model," Tyler told me.

He seemed to have less patience for the notion of BI as a highly specialized subset of IT. "I do have a problem with companies that miss the opportunity to use BI as part of their everyday process," he said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to contribute small but important incremental improvements. Every individual in a company is already making decisions."

Tyler believes that democratizing BI empowers more people in an organization to make better decisions. It's hard to argue with that.

Intel Expands Brand Through BI

I caught up with Andrew Fields of Intel, a co-sponsor of the symposium, and asked him why Intel decided to join the BI conversation. Here's what he told me:

"Intel wants to establish a leadership position in business intelligence."

Intel, he said, defines enterprise BI "as a solution that spans multiple data sources, from transactional data to legacy databases to operational data."

Viewed from that perspective, enterprise BI has a huge impact on IT infrastructure, "and that is the heart of our concern," he explained. "That's why we are working with SAS to define enterprise business intelligence in that manner," rather than simply as the capability to query and report or to have graphical interfaces.

Visualize BI

I had good conversation with Mitchell Burman of Analytics Operations Engineering in Boston. Like others at the symposium, Burman wants to take the mystery out of BI and make it more accessible to the people who need it. Here's the gist of his argument, in my words:

OK, you've explained something complicated to the CEO. Even if the CEO understands what you've just shown him, that doesn't mean he can turn around and explain it to a whole bunch of other people in the organization. The CEO needs an easy way to share the information that you've just shared with him. Graphics can be useful tools for sharing information. A dynamic graphic can show the effect of various inputs over time. Color thematic mapping is another handy tool for sharing information quickly. A picture is worth a thousand data points.