Cyril on Business Intelligence

Who thinks they know how fast we’re going? As the plurality of available reporting proceeds apace for most businesses, we are losing track of what we have, who has it, and what we could/should be doing with it all. It’s likely to be the spreadsheet stakes of the 1970s all over again. Remember? You turn up at a sales meeting and six different people have six different numbers all created on Visicalc on their personal Apple IIs.

Effective BI with adequate controls. We need this, but it will be elusive.

My preferred direction for improving BI is to encourage more creativity in report design, with emphasis on closer matching of information presentation and the executive’s cognitive decision processes. Regular readers will know that I have a hobby horse about inadequate requirements definition for BI, and its consequences.

But, I’m turning my attention, as an interim gambit, towards BI documentation. A form of modified bottom-up development methodology seems to be the most viable approach, given the existing situation in most IT departments and the exigencies of corporate life.

This requires accurate, clear, comprehensive and up-to-date documentation of the BI context. What is in the cubes, what KPIs are active, what measures? And who is using them. Which KPIs aren’t being used, why? If you like, what is in peoples dashboards – read 1970s Visicalc sheets. I’ve been working on a new project, BI Documenter for this, you may care to check it out at www.bidocumenter.com.

With this first step we can analyze the present, and offer executives a better way of looking at it.. I’ll discuss how we can do this in a later post.