« The BI Triumvirate - Technology, Process and People | Main | BI and SOA for Analytical Smorgasbord »
January 22, 2008
"What Management Is" - The crucial link between Business and Intelligence
Let us for a moment accept the hypothesis that the true intent of Business Intelligence is to help organizations manage their business better. Better in this context tends to be a rather elastic adjective as it straddles the entire spectrum of firms using BI for simple management reporting to the other extreme of using BI to "Compete on Analytics" in the marketplace.
"Managing business better" presents the classic question of - What aspects of business can BI help manage better?
The primary reference for listing down the different areas of business is the best management book I have ever read till date - "What Management Is" by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone. (http://www.amazon.com/What-Management-Works-Everyones-Business/dp/0743203186).This book really helps in drawing the boundaries around management concepts and for BI practitioners, like me, shows the direction for the evolution and applicability of BI.
In this post, I would just list down the different business areas that ought to be managed for the better and drill down into the applicability of BI for each of these areas in future posts.
1) Value Creation - BI can help in providing the critical "Outside-in" perspective
2) Business Model - Is this the right business to be in?
3) Strategy - Validation and tuning of Strategy through BI
4) Organization Boundaries - BI can help solve the Build vs Buy conundrum
5) Numbers in Business - Really the sweetspot for BI applications
6) Mission and Measures - Connecting the company mission with the measures
7) Innovation and Uncertainty - Domain of Predictive Analytics & its ilk
8) Focus - Realm of Pareto Law versus the more recent "Long-Tail" phenomenon
9) Managing People - Human Resource Analytics is one of the most happening analytics applicability areas at this point in time.
To me, the list above presents the most comprehensive high-level thought process when confronted with implementation of BI in organizations. In my consulting engagements, the litmus test is to really see whether the BI strategy covers the aspects of business as noted above - "More the coverage better is the BI vision".
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at January 22, 2008 10:30 AM
