The Right Approach to Business Intelligence

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Business intelligence efforts can be as futile as finding a needle in a field of haystacks--or BI efforts can help organizations find answers to questions that can’t be answered in a timely way via traditional data analysis and reporting methods. Deploying a successful BI program takes more than just implementing sophisticated tools, eye-catching dashboards and teams of analysts. Successful BI requires reliable data, great analytics and--most of all--seeking answers to the right questions. Done right, BI is a powerful business tool. Done wrong, BI is a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

In the beginning, BI represented the next step in the evolution of turning information into actionable knowledge. It was to allow organizations to take data from a multitude of sources and--through sophisticated data mining techniques and data analytics--find insights that previously eluded them. Over the years, the BI waters have been muddied, the hype overblown and the expectations seemingly impossible to satisfied. Like the advent of DBMS, OLTP, Decision Support Systems and other high-priced IT offerings, BI has become a vendor-driven solution in search of problems.

And that means buyer-beware. As providers strive to jump on the BI bandwagon, the waters of what is and isn’t a BI tool have become very murky. What was originally a way to mine data, identify …

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