This article is the first of the total of three that we are going to publish from LITEBI, each one will be part of a Whitepaper focused on the effects and contributions of Business Intelligence to the company from the point of view of the CEO.
What is Business Intelligence?
Wikipedia gives us the following definition on this concept:
“Computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes”
In other words, software tools that enable that all the information of a company (sales, purchases, financial information, production, marketing, etc.) “flows” in an organized way through the business, reaching the right person, at the right time. To this, in LITEBI we would also note that achieving Intelligence needs full-featured and integrated tools to manage and optimize the performance of the company as a whole and to align it with the business strategy.
A tool with all these characteristics makes things easier for those in charge of the decision making in each department: a CFO, a Sales Manager, a CEO or a Controller.
Business Intelligence or BI should be, among all enterprise software tools (including CRM and ERP), the most closely related with the management function, especially CEOs.
Since the computing revolution and the explosion of the Internet, information is acquiring more and more importance every day. Everything is digitalized or will be soon, the amount of existing information grows year after year, and most of our company’s processes are supported by complex information systems.
Studies tell us that the amount of information managed by companies doubles every two years and that 80% of decisions are made with only a 10% of the available information. ¡And all that information is power! It is essential to compete in today’s market.
How do CEOs benefit from Intelligence?
A manager would ask himself what does Business Intelligence do and in what way does it optimize the management of his business.
Business Intelligence allows businesses of any size and industry increase its performance. It helps users from any department make the best decisions, giving them access to easy and powerful analytical tools to extract value from the information they need.
From the CEO’s point of view, it is critical to control and understand what is going on in the company. Management implies analyzing and controlling those key factors that affect the operational and economic performance of the company. Therefore, we can say that the CEO can relate to Business Intelligence in two ways:
– As a user, to have available a global, trustful and easy to use vision of the business, that enables to control the performance, detect those situations that may require action or analyze in detail some aspects of the organization when needed.
– As a manager, making the business evolve to a metric-driven culture, so that everyone keeps in mind that “something that is not measured doesn’t exist”, leading the organization to use information as a valuable active.
What information does a CEO need?
Over which areas does a CEO make decisions? What areas should he be concerned of? His responsibility is global. He has to make decisions over all areas, and because of it, needs information about all the different departments of the company.
Moreover, having quality, updated information, and that avoids wasting time building manual reports, is a need that in a world that is constantly changing, and is more and more competitive every day, can’t be ignored.
To be able to control a company, define a strategy and focus on performance, the CEO needs to know what is happening over the business through frequent and direct access to information.
If the goal of Business Intelligence is to take, through an automatic process, information from any source inside or outside the company to the decision-maker’s desk, nobody needs more data than the CEO, neither the need of making the correct decisions is so critical for anyone else.
From this point of view it is clear that Business Intelligence seems to be, of all the areas of enterprise software, the closest to the CEO, closer to the place where the most critical decisions are made.
Answer the CEO’s questions:
• Control the business as a whole, with an integrated vision.
• Control the evolution of the strategic plans.
• Analyze integrated information of all the different departments: Sales, Financial, IT, etc..
Benefits of Business Intelligence for the company:
• Making better and more informed decisions
• Avoid spending time building reports.
• Control the Key Performance Indicators.
