Business Intelligence Consumers - Who are They?

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Thanks for joining me for this next installment of the Application Platform Thought Leader series guest blog. In this article, David Loshin explores “Business Intelligence Consumers – Who are They?”

For a long time, there had been an “aura” around business intelligence (BI) applications suggesting that the role of BI focused either on facilitating delivering predefined management reports to senior managers or on serving “professional analysts” whose job was largely to slice and dice data in order to inform those same senior managers regarding strategic business decisions. Interestingly, in 2004, the research/analysis firm Forrester provided a characterization of users of business intelligence[1], classifying users into five groups (with my own “commentary” added):

1. IT Users, who largely use BI tools for development purposes, using the product suites for data modeling, data integration, report generation, presentation and delivery. The IT users more likely to be using BI to support individuals within the organization as well as managing the creation and delivery of reports to outside information consumers.

2. Power Users are those sophisticated “professional analysts” who are have experience using complex tools, and are the individuals who often use BI tools to manipulate data within analysis environments, but are less likely to be reviewing pre-defined reports. These analysts support the business users and inform decision-making but may not necessarily be making the decisions.

3. Business Users are the managers who review the analyses presented by the power users, and may even do their own ad hoc queries, take the results of those queries and may import those into desktop productivity tools in order to create their own reports and presentations; business users are savvy about the data, and may cross the line into becoming power users in their own right.

4. Casual Users may review pre-designed reports, or eyeball different presentation schemes (such as scorecards or performance dashboards), with metrics rolled up across functional or operational areas. These decision-makers may take actions based on actionable knowledge presented to them, and may want to customize the presentation and delivery of BI based on adjustments to defined parameters.

5. Extra-Enterprise Users, including those external parties, customers, regulators, external business analysts, partners, suppliers, or anyone with a need for reported information for tactical decision-making.

Looking at the Forrester user categories almost five years later allows us to comment using our 20/20 hindsight. Two trends in the years that have passed since 2004, when considered at the same time, might lead to the conclusion that the “BI aura” is dissolving.

The first is the significant consolidation in the BI tools market. By 2004, vendor Hyperion had acquired Brio Software, but since then has been acquired itself by Oracle. BI giant Business Objects collected up a bunch of data integration and data quality vendors, and since has been swallowed by SAP. Cognos is now part of IBM, which has also added many data integration and data quality components to its tool suite. The second, which may be a byproduct of the first, involves the more seamless integration of BI capabilities across the implementation spectrum. Embedding BI functionality into everyday applications enables a more comprehensive use of the technology without forcing all the information consumers to become power users. These factors essentially make business intelligence more pervasive and expand the user base, leading the way for more creative employment of measurement and reporting in a rapidly evolving real-time manner.

In reality, with an increase in pervasiveness of data comes the expectation that these types of tools can enable optimization of all types of decision-making up, down, and across the management hierarchy. This suggests that BI will be able to provide input into performance measurement, productivity improvement, and the corresponding decision-making processes of any types of decision makers in different roles and levels across an organization, ranging from:

· Strategic decision-makers at the organizational level (such as defining and achieving organizational objectives, tactical decisions impacting operational activities such as those driving sales, compensation planning, financial consolidations, customer analytics and marketing directives, retail site location, and spend analytics);

· Operational decision-makers at the business application level (supporting operational applications such as supplier management, inventory, manufacturing, sales, fulfillment, logistics, finance);

· Tactical decisions at the team level (focusing on decisions related to process efficiency, collaboration during the execution of business activities processes, centralized data sharing, efficient workflows, and rapid and secure information analysis);

Monitoring performance against defined objectives can enable impact decision making processes informing our daily jobs across the organization, suggesting how the latest financial reports impact potential mergers and acquisitions, telling the sales people which of the new customer leads within their territories are the most likely to purchase particular items, improving customer service with real-time adjustments to call-center scripts, or reallocation of manufacturing resources based on real-time product demand – the list can go on and on, and in the upcoming months we’ll explore different ways BI is meeting these needs.

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[1] Gile, Keith, “Tech Choices: Grading BI Reporting and Analysis Solutions,” Forrester, August 2004

Check back next week for a video on Data Requirements for Reporting.

[1] Gile, Keith, “Tech Choices: Grading BI Reporting and Analysis Solutions,” Forrester, August 2004