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BI for the Masses - Is It Becoming a Reality?

Analyst Take

"Business intelligence (BI) for the masses" is rarely achieved within organizations. Companies are working toward a goal of creating and deploying a BI solution to every decision- maker within the organization. However, the current infrastructure within most organizations involves departmental solutions implemented to help solve business and performance issues or to report on specific information based on departmental requirements. They rarely provide a 360-degree view of the organization. How do organizations move to a BI framework that enables end users across the organization to access the information they need to make informed decisions?

The Starting Point

Generally, BI solutions grow out of a need to solve a business issue. As BI matures within the organization and the industry evolves, new technologies are becoming an essential aspect of overall solutions. These include the convergence of BI and search, mobile computing and centralized portal-based deployment. The common element is the increase of BI use within the organization. BI search enables any end user to search text strings to identify reports, OLAP cubes, etc. within a user-friendly environment, enabling organizations to move beyond the concept that BI only serves the requirements of super users. Mobile BI allows reports and graphs to be delivered to BlackBerries and other handheld portable devices; portal-based deployments offer centralized access point to BI solutions. On their own, none of these areas create BI for the masses, but used with the right data, they provide the backbone for an organization's overall BI solution.

Although there are inherent advantages to search, mobile computing and portal-based deployments; simple implementation does not change what information is available to end users. These options are the starting point in the movement to attaining BI for the masses. Unless these initiatives are coupled with a strategy to gather and analyze information that answers the questions of business units and ties into overall business strategy and performance management, they only solve half of the problem.

Delivering BI for the masses includes providing the right information to each decision-maker within the organization. Enabling a larger base of end users with access to a wider range of reporting and analysis tools leads to the expansion and sharing of information and generates more ideas throughout the organization relating to the way similar information can be used by different departments to develop and to drive performance. This creates collaboration across the organization, which in turn leads to a collective approach to BI development and deployment.

BI search, mobile, and portal-based solutions allow more end users access to more information faster to increase the reach of BI within the organization. Once increased access is guaranteed, decision-makers that may not have had access to BI can see what is available and identify what may be missing. Organizations can develop BI applications such as data marts that can link to one another to provide an overall view of the organization and not just ones that are based on departmental solutions. Implementing one or more of these options should not be used as a replacement for the development and the maintenance of BI that offers strategic decision-making based on overall organizational goals.

Access to information is not a substitute for the collection of the right information. Although organizations may increase the number of users that access information, unless the data they access reflects and provides the answers to their business issues, access alone becomes meaningless. For instance, an organization that wants to increase market share by three percent within the next three years should identify what factors are required to do so. Simply granting BI access to decision-makers needing that information will only create frustration if that information does not exist within the current BI infrastructure. Information required to identify how the organization is measuring up to the task should be defined and captured, tying departmental decision-making initiatives to organization-wide performance management. This is the only way to achieve true BI for the masses.

The evolution of search, mobile and portal deployments enables more decision-makers to access organization-wide BI applications. However, without linking the technology to information that helps drive business decisions, organizations may be missing the boat. To achieve true BI for the masses, organizations should tie their initial and incremental BI initiatives to include gathering and analyzing data that can be used beyond departmental deployments toward the collection of organization-wide decisioning, driving information and collaboration.


Lyndsay Wise is an industry analyst for business intelligence. For more than seven years, she has assisted clients in business systems analysis, software selection and implementation of enterprise applications. Wise also conducts research of leading technologies, products and vendors in business intelligence, marketing performance management, master data management, and unstructured data. Check out her blog at myblog.wiseanalytics.com.

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