Linking Business Intelligence Into Your Business - Stijn Viaene

Stijn Viaene, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School & K.U.Leuven

IT departments are under pressure to serve their enterprises by

professionalizing their business intelligence (BI) operation. Companies

can only be effective when their systematic and structured approach to

BI is linked into the business itself.

For the third year in a row, business intelligence

(BI) topped the list of technological

priorities in the 2008 Gartner Group CIO

survey. BI refers to a broad category of applications

and technologies for gathering, storing,

analyzing, and providing access to data that helps

business users make better decisions. The challenge

is to extract real intelligence from continuous

and massive data feeds without being overwhelmed

in the process. Clearly, there’s more to

this than just pushing and pulling around data. BI

offers a systematic, structured approach to tackling

this challenge from an enterprise perspective.

The term encompasses a value chain that includes

transforming data into information and reaching

out to decision makers with it in ways that serve

optimal use. Ultimately, companies only realize

business benefits at the end of this chain (see Figure

1).1

Author Thomas Davenport has argued that analytics

and BI have swapped the back room for the

boardroom.2 Organizations such as Wal-Mart,

Harrah’s, Marriott, and Capital One are claimed

to have built their business on their abilities to

gather, analyze, and act on data. Such organizations,

called analytics competitors, are raising the

bar for their competition. (See the “Related Work

in Business Intelligence” sidebar for additional

research.)

Executing on BI’s promise, however, is turning

out to be more challenging than expected for IT

departments. One of the hardest nuts to crack is

how to preserve and leverage the organization’s

sizeable investments in an enterprise-class tech-

Linking Business

Intelligence into

Your Business

28 IT Pro November/December 2008 P u b...