what do you think BI is?

Business Intelligence (”BI”) and I go way back: late ’90’s at Seagate Software when I watched our entire company try to educate the world on what business intelligence was (at the time there was only competitive intelligence).  Over the years as a financial analyst and working up to chief financial officer, business intelligence has been a part of my day to day regime for a while.

So, today, I find myself at the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (”TAP”) Airlift for Office 14.  Yup, looking at Microsoft’s future offerings with an eye for a comprehensive business intelligence solution.  But as I sit through session after session listening to product managers discuss all the cool stuff coming out in Office 14, I can’t help but think:

what do people think business intelligence is?

Back in the day, we concisely told our customers (and this was included in my job description) that business intelligence revolved around:

access, analyze, report, share. 

It wasn’t just about the finance department, and standard metrics, it was about empowering all employees from every buiness unit to use the data that was being captured within the company, analyze it and mine it for meaningful information, create some great reports (reports, cubes, dashboards, scorecards, interactive queries, metrics, key performance indicators, etc.) and share this information with other people in the company.  The idea was that if you knew what was going on in your company you could make better decisions for future actions.  I still believe this.

But, while here, I have discovered that there isn’t just business intelligence anymore.  There is also “corporate performance management” and just ol’ “performance management“.  I was given a Gartner report, “Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites” April 30, 2009, that included all the big BI vendors in the leaders/visionaries quadrant: Oracle Hyperion, SAP (BusinessObjects, IBM (Cognos).  But I still had to ask:

what is corporate performance management (”CPM”)?

According to the Gartner report, CPM is:

“a process used to manage corporate performance, such as strategy formulation, budgeting and forecasting; the methodologies that support these processes, including the balanced scorecard, or value based management; and the metrics used to measure performance against strategic and operational performance goals.”

Right then.  It’s a process.  But then later Gartner tries to say that it is part of broader BI and performance management strategies because it distinguishes itself by having a forecasting capability.  They relegate BI as the act of “further exploration” from your dashboards, scorecards and KPI’s.  But, as I mentioned, the leaders and visionaries in this ecosystem are all vendors with a BI offering and a process needs to be supported by tools and infrastructure.  If Gartner had not included the “process” part it sounds like it could still be BI.  Hmmm.

Maybe business intelligence needs a restart?  Where does it sit in the overall information management space?  I think all the ecosystem names of: ECM (enterprise content management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), CPM (corporate performance management), CRM (customer relationship management), UC (unified communication), blah, blah, blah. - it’s all too confusing.  Really, at the end of the day, I just want to be able to run my business intelligently with the aid of some effective tools.

So, here I sit - looking at Microsoft’s products to determine how will they effectively fit into my idea of a business intelligence solution.  And although I can’t discuss what is in Office 14, I can say that, for as long as I can remember, when you are a small company Excel will always be the best starter tool for business intelligence.  We can debate the rest later.

So, again, what do you think business intelligence is?