Here is an interesting interview with Howard Dresner - who helped build the BI practice for Gartner. I think his replies are very insightful….
Gartner credits him for taking business intelligence (BI) from an esoteric “backwater” to a mainstream and highly valued research area. Howard Dresner, who spent 13 years at Gartner and built up the analyst firm’s BI practice, says his vision in 1989 was to establish information democracy—getting information in the hands of all constituents. At that time, eyebrows were raised in management circles with respect to the various pros and cons of this new hypothesis, says the chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions Corp. He sees analytics as simply applied business intelligence. “And, this is what I call BI with a purpose,” he adds. In a recent interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, Dresner informs that the next high ground is business performance management (BPM), which is what BI becomes when it evolves.
How has the BI market developed and where is it going?
Increasingly, business intelligence is becoming a feature of business performance management. When I was at Gartner, I recognised that the market was changing—markets do this, they converge functionally and other wise. And this has been happening for the past couple of years now. Increasingly, performance management has become a very high priority especially for business people.
Traditionally, business intelligence has been more of a technology issue. In contrast to this, performance management is more of a business initiative that is being enabled by technology. And, it’s built on BI. You can’t do BPM without BI. So, BPM at this moment of time has a lot of energy surrounding it than BI.
Is BPM the next step to BI?
It’s the other way around. BPM is sort of absorbing BI. It is all about aligning people and process with a purpose. Typically, CIOs and CFOs are grappling with the same set of challenges: How well is your business performing today? What can you do to improve it? BPM delivers the visibility into their businesses that they need to answer these questions—and helps them do what has to be done to improve performance and successfully reach their goals. With BPM, they can collect, organise and analyse data—then distribute it throughout the enterprise using a rich, unified workspace that makes business performance management easier and more powerful than ever before.
Has BI evolved as you had envisaged way back in 1989?
Quite frankly, we have not made the progress I had expected. The only saving grace is that technology has advanced tremendously. It’s just much more usable and more sophisticated. The present BI products are much more evolved. Also, the hardware, software and the entire infrastructure have become much better from where we were in 1989. Who could have imagined scaling BI at an entire enterprise level at that time? But today, thanks to advancements in technology and architecture, one can scale BI to every user constituent.
As far as the impediments are concerned, enterprises are still fairly fragmented—they don’t always view BI as a strategic tool. Besides, BI implementations still tend to be deployed functionally or departmentally.
What should be the key points CIOs ought to keep in mind when adopting BI tools?
Having the right technology is only half the story. Getting people to use it is quite another matter. Hence, before embarking on their tech journey, the CEOs and CIOs have to first start understanding the priorities of the business and the mission of the business—because this is about technology supporting business, not just implementing tools. They ought to pick focused activities. This boils down to a basic reality: You’ve got to do things in as manageable a scope as you possibly can. Hence, implementing a competency centre, platform standardisation, and tool consolidation are all valuable things undertake. Also, BI or BPM is an ongoing process. It will not happen overnight. But, when you compare it to something like ERP, this is a cakewalk.
How can enterprises plan strategically for BI?
Enterprises need to organise for it and have a roadmap. They need to self assess and ask: where are we technologically? Where are we from a business perspective and where do we want to be and what will be the steps to getting there? You can also have a roadmap for BPM. So, it’s more of a journey, not a destination. Not having business intelligence and not having BPM puts enterprises at a significant disadvantage in today’s times. This is not just about technology; it’s just the enabler.
How does Hyperion plan to grow its market in India?
We are extremely strong in verticals like retail, banking and finance, manufacturing, telecom and public sector. At Hyperion and Oracle, we have a comprehensive set of solutions to address their needs.
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February 16, 2008
Information is King it is said. However, rarely is information even obtained within most major corporations. Most only reach the level of having huge piles of data. Data that is not even verifiable or in a form that could be used. There are multiple sources for the same data sets thus bringing into question the integrity of any one of the datasets. 