Storytelling depends upon ubiquitous Business Intelligence
Being able to tell a story with Business Intelligence content is a must for any organization. It is this story telling ability that allows the organization to realize new insights and then put the appropriate context around the information to improve processes or decision making abilities. It is also an iterative process. I may gain an insight from an analysis session and present this as a story to several departments within my organization. Those departments will then take my story, do their own analysis on the information within their own contexts, and tell their own story. The end result is that the organization is unifying around stories that attempt to understand what their data is telling them and then collaborating on improvements to achieve more efficient business processes.
I would argue that this level of collaboration can only be achieved if Business Intelligence is provided to everyone within the organization. Only then will employees have the power to determine these insights on their own without waiting for the problem to get bigger or for someone else to realize the problem exists. As Business Intelligence vendors we have been saying for years, we want to make our products ubiquitous…but how?
Cindi Howson posted an article in February of 2008 talking about how we should achieve ubiquitous, or pervasive, BI. She found that, at the time, only 25% of workers were using BI. I would venture to say that this number is not much higher today. I’m sure that there has been some increase due to the focus on government audits and a larger understanding of the importance of data, but overall, the number probably has not moved much. The reasons are ultimately still the same as Cindi points out in her article: companies need to realize the value of the data they have, they need to deploy the tools to more than just analysts and power users, and they need to provide the rights tools to the right workers. So, why haven’t companies made more progress towards these goals already? Largely because the products they are using do not make it easy. As BI vendors we need to do more in order to make BI easier to adopt for all users within an organization.
Within the next three posts, I will focus on the following ideas with regards to ubiquitous BI:
- Creating simpler, interoperable products that start with basic functionality and expose advanced functionality when needed
- Ensuring that our products are enjoyable to use by taking advantage of collaborative techniques and our community of users
- Focusing on making our products embeddable
The goal of these posts will be to explain how BI vendors can further enhance their existing features along these lines and learn from other software that utilize these ideas to create easy to use and easy to deploy products.
Tags: Business Intelligence, collaboration, information analysis, information sharing, pervasive, storytelling, ubiquitous
July 9th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
BI needs to become pervasive, only when it is embedded in to the processes and functions of business allowing users to make second to second tactical decisions does it become pervasive.
The next leap to get us there is the dynamic interface. We have to stop trying to guess what the user will need or not guessing at all and over presenting data as information. There is a distinct difference in the 2 items. Only when the gui becomes a conduit to turning the data to information in a dynamic way are we to the point in the evolution that we become pervaisve and meaniful to 100% of the community.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 am
Hey David,
Thanks for the comment and sorry for taking so long to reply.
I completely agree about pervasive BI being dependent upon on us helping making decisions easier instead of getting in the way. Ultimately, users do not care whether they are using BI or not so long as they are able to get to the information that they need to do their jobs and complete their projects. Users complete business processes by following a series of workflows. As BI vendors, we should create software that enhances those workflows instead of getting in the way of them. This is where I see us being embedded into the business procesess.
When it comes to a dynamic interface, I also agree that we need to stop guessing what a user may need based on their role. Many users flex to different roles as they perform their jobs. This will take them from being a casual user to an analyst and even to a storyteller about the information. As such, we need to design our software so that it is is not only portable, but also so that it information flows freely throughout our products and even into 3rd party products.
Great points David.
Coy