BI is not just a dashboard
The more we read about Business intelligence and related areas, people start getting into a thought process of Dashboard and slice and dice capabilities of it. That is natural when it comes to the tool and technology capabilities of how to look at the data. But may times people fail to realize that its mere a delivery mechanism. Though that needs to be powerful – if the data behind the scene is not good enough, intelligent enough to provide you desired analytical direction – the tool cannot do anything.
Take an example of a much hot market of strategic sourcing / procurement market here. There are lot of technologies coming up to provide the spend analysis in deep and from various perspectives. But can you so supplier analysis correctly, or supplier risk analysis correctly – if you dont know if your supplier A is same as B and their parent is supplier C. So ultimately the X amount that you are spending is on C and you have good chance to negotiate on that. Do they have visibility towards that if data doesnt have these links? NO. Everybody got a thousands of supplier – do they have data telling them – they have only 400 suppliers with whom they do business above 5000K, and when grouped by their corporate parent linkages, and when you remove payment to individuals from your list? NO. So thats the emerging service which service providers started providing.
Thats just one example, but there are lot of things like that. Enterprise manager takes pain to change or implement the BI technology platform and training and staffing – to get the dashboard ready for CFO, CPO – but many people even doesnt look at the data beneath. The point is look at the data first, save there by standardizing data, have masters cleansed and then have a nice dashboard to win win situation.
How and where to start is a big question and confusion I agree. I am trying to throw more light on that on my blog here . May be you can follow to have good debate on that. You can also mail me on pmendki(at)gmail(dot)com
Thanks
Prashant Mendki
http://manageyourdata.blogspot.com
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Guest
Filed under: Business Intelligence
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