Top 5 Things Smaller Businesses Don’t Know About BI

This article by Laurie Sullivan lays out 5 of the most important things small and midsize businesses need to know about business intelligence. While I found it interesting that she lists off the usual suspects in the traditional, on-premise BI market and makes no mention of the SaaS opportunity, her list (with my commentary) is instructive nevertheless:

1. Not all BI projects start with an expensive and lengthy investment. (Can you say, on-demand analytic applications? Her advice is still to build the nuclear on premise with scaled-down BI suites. You own the solution, and you own the problem in terms of integration, on-going maintenance, upgrades, training, etc.)
2. Data warehouses aren’t required to build a successful business intelligence project. (Amen! This is a fundamental belief of LucidEra.)
3. Multibillion-dollar companies analyze only 20 percent of the data they collect and store. Small and midsize businesses can outperform much larger organizations by increasing that percentage. (Hallelujah!! As we like to say, “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!”)
4. BI projects can transition into revenue-generating investments by designing reports and selling information to partners and customers. (Violent agreement here, except for the “sunk costs” that most of these projects get mired in. At Business Objects we used to try to avoid the term “data warehouse” at all costs due to the IT pain most of these “projects” bring to mind within many organizations.)
5. Combining BI with service-oriented architecture (SOA) can streamline business processes and allow more people across a company to access and benefit from the data. (Now we’re back in IT-implementation speak. This is where people in SMB / midsized companies lose interest. If I’m a VP of sales at a high-growth company, do I want to hear about SOA or how the right business analytics can help me increase my deal size, close more deals faster, and improve sales effectiveness? As soon as the conversation can move away from tools and towards analytic solutions, the BI market will continue to struggle to get the attention of the people who need it the most.)

posted by Darren Cunningham at 11:56 am

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Sanjath Shringeri

Posted on 4th December, 2007

I think even though #5 is IT speak, it can be interpreted in a little different way, i.e: providing the analytics through SOA architecture to close the loop between transactional system and analytics infrastructure. I think one thing that is going to be deciding factor is easy access to analytics, standalone BI systems are accessed by few and if BI/Analytics is delivered through the transactional system there is much more use of the analytics architecture rather than just at starategic level. E.g: If analytics related to a customer (buying pattern, cross-sell oppty etc) is delivered to a CSR through the transactional system, it would be much more effective way then asking CSR to login to another system to analyze this particular customer.