Giving Business Intelligence the Business, Part 5

 

It’s the process … again.

This article concludes a series we’ve run on this blog during the past several weeks about Business Intelligence. During that time, topics have been explored that will be built out in a whitepaper I am writing on behalf of Quest with several of its key service and solution providers. The focus has been, and will continue to be, on the Business use of BI technologies rather than upon those technologies themselves.

I was discussing all this yesterday with Bill McGinnis at RapidDecision (http://www.rapiddecision.net/) one of the contributing vendors to that whitepaper series. Bill, by the way, is a familiar face at Quest events and will be at COLLABORATE 10 (About COLLABORATE). We were discussing Business User Adoption, a segment of that whitepaper, in two ways: that (a) business decisions are typically made within the context of a finite, definable process, and that (b) for information (i.e. Business Intelligence) to be effectively used (i.e. Business User Adoption) it needs to be available in the way in which decisions are made within those processes. The result is that BI tools need to be designed, developed, deployed and supported within the context of a decision process. Much too often (most of the time?) information such as Reports, Analytics and Dashboards are used to validate a decision being made rather than to reach the decision in the first place.

What Bill and I realized was that, just as any organization has a finite set of Transaction Processes that ERP systems automate and integrate, it correspondingly has a finite set of key Management Processes that require information from BI systems. By first identifying those Management Processes and the way in which information is used during those processes, BI can become truly relevant.

As an example, consider the Management Process of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), which supports the Transaction Process of Plan to Produce. S&OP is the process that any organization uses to balance demand (Sales) with supply (Operations). Yes, every organization has this process (small ‘p’) by nature, although many don’t define it or design it as a Process (large ‘P’). If done well, this process results in an optimal plan. If not done well, it results in a negotiated – or even worse – averaged plan. The key determinant may very well be the way in which information is used. All too often, each constituency enters such a dialogue armed with its own reports or dashboards rather than there being a consolidated set, commonly referred to as a ‘Single Version of the Truth.’

Two needs emerge: (a) BI products need to be tailored to specific Management Processes and (b) prior to BI development or deployment an organization’s BI team needs to engage its functional counterparts around the way in which such processes operate and the way in which supporting decisions are made. This is analogous to the process mapping portion of any ERP deployment.

Of course, this requires two things: (a) that an organization is prepared to define a Management Process in the first place and (b) that a strong I.T./Business Alignment exists within the organization. Both of these items are very hard to accomplish, but it may very well be that improving Business User Adoption may depend upon it. We may be kidding ourselves by continually deploying these systems without them.

The next blog series will take on this issue of Business/I.T. Alignment but will be delayed for a couple of weeks. My wife and I are beginning our move south, and I’ll be preoccupied for a while. The packers arrive in one hour.  

Regards,
Rick