Analyzing data in a data driven organization

So now the company has made a considerable investment implementing a powerful data warehouse and a sophisticated front-end Business Intelligence tool, in line with the requirements specified by users during the requirements analyses stage of the process…but what now?

One would assume that once a user has his wish list of data available at the press of a button that everything would change instantly, but surprisingly it is not necessarily so! Photo by Argonne National Laboratory.

Firstly there is the resistance to change that needs to be accounted for. A manager that used to get information through manual processes and excel spreadsheets prepared by sub-ordinates doesn’t necessarily have the time to invest learning how to work on a new tool, even when he is offered to be trained after the implementation.

And even if he goes for some quick training, it would normally be within a busy schedule with many other pressing and urgent matters to attend to. He would typically play around for a short time, think he understands, but back at his desk it would be so much more convenient to just go back to the old way of doing.

Secondly, one needs to know what to do with data and how to interpret it, before it becomes helpful. If the Business Intelligence solution simply produces for him the same information in almost similar format he used to get it before, by means of straight forward reports, it may be simpler for him to adapt.

But the power of Business Intelligence is in fact therein that it can do much more than create reports. It makes available to the manager, multi-dimensional data which can be analyzed from various angles.

Such a wealth of information are always sought after, but then comes the challenge what to do with it and how to act upon it in order for the organization to thrive and gain maximum returns on their investment. Not everybody knows how to interpret data.

The tendency often is that managers just request everything (all information) they can possibly think of during the requirements interview, and think that perhaps later they will find ways to make the most use of all this information. But once the BI solution is completed, their time has not become more, their responsibilities not less, and the poor project manager that wants to tick off that everybody has learned their part, could be considered as a real bother during that time.

Ideally analytics should emerge from a centralized point driven by the CEO.

The common problem that organizations often encounter when using analytical tools is to figure out what should be focused on. Sometimes there is just so much information available that a user can get entirely lost in it.

Thirdly, the temptation is that once the manager start playing around with the information, exploring many interesting facts and trends, that he can end up working on things that is not key or essential to the organization.

Going after data that may result in insignificant small savings, may not even be worth the effort. On the other hand, sometimes one needs some space to explore and look at things from various angles to come up with some great questions to ask the system that could open up new opportunities.

Fourthly it should be noted that what the user wanted during the requirements analysis stage at the onset of the Business Intelligence project, may have changed since. The organization may have grown and changed, he may have grown and changed, and what is important to the organization may have changed.

These things should be considered even before a Business Intelligence solution is put in place. For an organization with simple data, a small range of products or services and only one specialty this may be not as challenging as for others.

Yolande Kleynhans
(yolandek ‘at’ mtn.blackberry.com)

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