Interactive BI, Self-Service & Tighter Decision-Making Windows

Aberdeen released a report that highlights the increasingly difficult time problem in business intelligence and the way that Agile development and interactive, business-driven BI address the issue. In short, business executives and analysts have to make decisions faster. The solution from a BI perspective is really two-pronged – using Agile BI to develop new tools faster and ensuring the tools themselves empower users through high degrees of self-service and interactivity.

Aberdeen’s analysis is based on previous research into development methodologies. The findings showed that 103 out of 237 respondents said their organizations are still using traditional methodologies exclusively. No wonder, in the words of the report’s author, that:

Organizations are struggling to get the right information to the right people at the right time.

The cause is largely due to:

Vast inflow of fresh data and increasingly demanding community of business managers.

So the high-level diagnosis seems on track. But the issues and problems multiply as “decision-making windows” shrink – a phenomenon experienced by 64% of business managers surveyed. Of course, we all know this intuitively; quicker business cycles, intense cost and competitive pressures, and fast-moving, technology-fueled markets mean we need to make decisions faster, which means BI teams must deliver more data faster to support those decisions.

And there is plenty more data go around; Aberdeen’s research says IT has seen 40% increases in data volumes, which bogs down development.

The speed with which “best-in-class” (and the speediest) BI organizations can move really caught our eye. According to Aberdeen, they can “add a column to report in an average of 4.3 hours and create entirely new dashboards in 3.8 days.” There is no way to deliver BI this fast without using Agile BI methodologies to ensure strong interaction and excellent communication between developers and business users. Faster development cycles are just a reality of today’s business.

Further, Aberdeen highlights visual or interactive BI tools as critical to keeping up with the increasing time pressures. How? By enabling greater self-service and more interactive or “drill-down” capabilities.

Self-service BI encapsulates the concept that business managers will be fully empowered to analyze data and discover new business insights without direct help from corporate IT.

This sounds like business-driven BI at its best. We often describe this to our clients as the ability to “ask questions of the data,” a functionality that is built directly into the core of Balanced Insight Consensus.

The bottom line is that IT and the business must collaborate more effectively and frequently if they are to prosper mutually in our fast new world of tighter decision-making cycles. And IT is no longer the gatekeeper, a point we made here. Or, as the report’s author says:

IT must move to a more supportive role – providing analytical tools, education and support, and a rich set of high-quality data – to enable business users to be more self-sufficient … [this] approach to business intelligence takes responsibility for the discovery of relationships in the data away from IT organizations and places it where it can be used to best advantage – with the managers who truly understand the business.