“Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business?” by George M. Tomko

Introduction

George Tomko’s CIO Rant has been on my list of recommended sites for quite some time. I also follow George on twitter.com (http://twitter.com/gmtomko) and have always found his perspective on business and technology matters to be extremely interesting and informative.

George’s latest blog post is is on a subject that is clearly close to my heart and is entitled Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business? I should also thank him for quoting my earlier artcile, Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom, in this. Being mentioned in the same breath as Einstein is always gratifying as well!

George acknowledges that this is something of a “What comes first – the chicken or the egg?” situation. He starts out by building on an article by Gerry Davis at Heidrick & Struggles to state:

1. collecting [information about customers] is “easy”
2. analyzing it is hard
3. disseminating it is very hard

Both George and Gerry agreed that the mountains of data that many organisations compile are not always very effectively leveraged to yield information, let alone knowledge or wisdom. Gerry proposes:

identifying and appointing the right executive — someone with superb business acumen …

Introduction

George Tomko’s CIO Rant has been on my list of recommended sites for quite some time. I also follow George on twitter.com (http://twitter.com/gmtomko) and have always found his perspective on business and technology matters to be extremely interesting and informative.

George’s latest blog post is is on a subject that is clearly close to my heart and is entitled Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business? I should also thank him for quoting my earlier artcile, Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom, in this. Being mentioned in the same breath as Einstein is always gratifying as well!

George acknowledges that this is something of a “What comes first – the chicken or the egg?” situation. He starts out by building on an article by Gerry Davis at Heidrick & Struggles to state:

1. collecting [information about customers] is “easy”
2. analyzing it is hard
3. disseminating it is very hard

Both George and Gerry agreed that the mountains of data that many organisations compile are not always very effectively leveraged to yield information, let alone knowledge or wisdom. Gerry proposes:

identifying and appointing the right executive — someone with superb business acumen combined with a sound technical understanding — and tasking them with delivering real business intelligence

George assesses this approach through the prism of the the three points listed above and touches on the ever present challenges of business silos; agreeing that the type of executive that Gerry recommends appointing could be effective in acting across these. However he introduces a note of caution, suggesting that it may be more difficult than ever to kick-off cross-silo initiatives in today’s turbulent times.

I tend to agree with George on this point. Crises may deliver the spark necessary for corporate revolution and unblock previously sclerotic bureaucracies. However, they can equally yield a fortress mentality where views become more entrenched and any form or risk taking or change is frowned upon. The alternative is incrementalism, but as George points out, this is not likely to lead to a major improvement in the “IQ” of organisations (this is an area that I cover in more detail in Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI).
 
 
The causality dilemma

Returning to George’s chicken and egg question, do intelligent enterprises build good business intelligence, or does good business intelligence lead to more intelligent enterprises? Any answer here is going to vary according to the organisations involved, their cultures, their appetites for change and the environmental challenges and evolutionary pressures that they face.

Having stated this caveat, my own experience is of an organisation that was smart enough to realise that it needed to take better decisions, but maybe not aware that business intelligence was a way to potentially address this. I spoke about this as one of three sceanrios in my recent artcile, “Why Business Intelligence projects fail”. Part of my role in this organisation (as well as building a BI team from scratch and developing a word-class information architecture) was to act as evangelist the benefits of BI.

The work that my team did in collaboration with a wide range of senior business people, helped an organisation to whole-heartedly embrace business intelligence as a vehicle to increasing its corporate “IQ”. Rather than having this outcome as a sole objective, this cultural transfomation had the significant practical impact of strongly contributing to a major business turn-around from record losses over four years, to record profits sustained over six. This is precisely the sort of result that well-designed, well-managed BI that addresses important business questions can (and indeed should) deliver.
 
 
Another sporting analogy

I suppose that it can be argued that only someone with a strong natural aptitude for a sport can become a true athlete. Regardless of their dedication and the amount of training they undertake, the best that lesser mortals can aspire to is plain proficiency. However, an alternative perspective is that it is easy enough to catalogue sportsmen and women who have failed to live up to their boundless potential, where perhaps less able contemporaries have succeeded through application and sheer bloody-minded determination.

I think the same can be said of the prerequisites for BI success and the benefits of successful BI. Organisations with a functioning structure, excellent people at all levels, good channels of communication and a clear sense of purpose are set up better to succeed in BI than their less exemplary competitors (for the same reason that they are set up better to do most things). However, with sufficient will-power (which may initially be centred in a very small group of people, hopefully expanding over time), I think that it is entirely possible for any organisation to improve what it knows about its business and the quality of the decisions it takes.

Good Business Intelligence is not necessarily the preserve of elite organisations – it is within the reach of all organisations who possess the minimum requirements of the vision to aspire to it and the determination to see things through.
 

He can be reached at gtomko@tomkotek.com
 

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Posted in business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, it business alignment, management, technology Tagged: bi, information technology, success factors