Get One Single unified View of disparate data
A fable that was told in India many years ago. It is a good warning about how our sensory perceptions can lead to misinterpretations.
If I retold this story today to teach a lesson about BI, I might call it “Three blind analysts and a data warehouse.” Business people struggle every day to make sense of data, stumbling blindly, touching only small parts of the information, and coming away with a narrow and fragmented understanding of what it means. Conventional BI tools make it unnecessarily difficult to explored the data from multiple perspectives, so analysts tend to pursue only a limited set of predetermined questions. It is simply too time consuming to explore the data thoroughly, allowing fresh discoveries to lead them to comprehensive and free-flowing exploration.
Without the ability to examine data from multiple perspectives simultaneously, many of the meaningful relationships that exist in our data will remain hidden.
3 Blind Analyst and Data warehouse
We stumble blindly and understand only in part, mostly because we are disabled by ineffective tools. BI solution makes it so easy to shift from one perspective to another while exploring and analyzing data that we, as analysts, are encouraged to pursue every question that arises during the process, almost as fast as we can think of them. Because we are not distracted by the mechanics of using the software or forced to go through time-consuming steps to get from one view of the data to another, we become immersed in the data and the analytical process. We are able to spend our time thinking about the data, not wrestling with the software.
Business intelligence is a critical tool for organizational success and survival. Enterprises are under pressure to “open up,” to become more transparent. Increasingly, shareholders, authorities and customers demand to know how the enterprise operates. Most executives still think of disclosing corporate performance data to analysts at quarterly briefings and to employees some days or weeks after the quarter end. Yet disclosure of performance data is not a chore — it is an opportunity to create competitive advantage. Visionary companies in the “new economy” will use disclosure of corporate performance data to attract capital and empower employees. Equally important, BI has become a customer service tool. BI gives the customer access to relevant parts of the enterprise’s management information; information therefore becomes a service concept. Many enterprises have allowed this access to enhance customer loyalty or because they have to as it has become a necessity in their markets. In some verticals even competitors share information to benchmark their non-competitive processes. In the pharmaceutical market this process already is fully commercialized, which is bound to happen in verticals like Telecom too (as other verticals that have comparable services and are highly regulatory).
Enterprises should challenge their existing information publishing strategy to look for opportunities to create competitive advantage.
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Hiten Rathod
Filed under: Business Intelligence, View Points & Perspective
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