Performance Management
Business Intelligence is an evolving industry with growing market potential which has attracted a swarm of players who are serving their customers in several different novel ways. It has grown from a technology focused on decision support and performance management in some departments to increasingly ubiquitous tool that spans operations management across the enterprise. As it incorporates a gamut of functions from business activity monitoring to performance management and business planning, business intelligence attracts a growing number of companies who earlier specialized in individual functions. Customers have a daunting task of choosing from a rich crop of innovative packages; they will have to make a judgment about the products that will become the standard for the industry in the future.
The growth of the business intelligence industry has been propelled by convergence of several factors which will continue to fuel rapid expansion and innovation. Regulatory compliance is inescapable and the need to monitor operations risks is the baseline for additional applications to reduce costs, fraud detection, accelerated responses to market changes, better targeting of customers, detection of latent opportunities for product development and a personalized approach to selling among several other applications.
The process of selection from several different offerings will be influenced by enterprises’ preference for tactical or strategic goals or a combination of them. While decision-support analysis or performance management in selected functional areas are possible in isolation with business intelligence tools alone, companies will need a comprehensive strategy, including business process management, content management and performance management, when they weave business intelligence into the fabric of their daily business activity for rapid responses to market changes. Dell, for example, has embedded intelligence into its daily business and is able to set in motion its business processes all along the supply chain, once a configuration for a computer is spelt out by a customer, including orders for its contract manufacturers and shipping companies.
In the past, spreadsheets, OLAP tools, management report generation and query tools were the preferred tools as they catered to decision-support and performance management in selective functional areas. Enterprises will need more of dashboards and performance management tools as they look to monitor and evaluate business activity across the enterprise. They also need to able to collaborate and communicate rapidly for a coordinated response to contingencies facing the enterprise based on the information received from performance metrics. In general, they need to aggregate, analyze and act in near real time.