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Cindi Howson's BI Scorecard
Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a Web site for in-depth BI product reviews. She has been using, implementing and evaluating business intelligence tools for more than 15 years. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and Business Objects XI R2: The Complete Reference. She teaches for The Datawarehousing Institute (TDWI) and is a frequent speaker at industry events. See More by Cindi Howson To Get BI to 110 Percent, Add Business Relevance
In my last blog, I asked you to think about how you can take your BI deployment to 110 percent of your employees. Part of what will get you there is technology dependent. The other part is business relevance. In building a BI application or individual report, business and IT engage in a clumsy dance of users defining their requirements and IT interpreting those requirements. If the business doesn’t ask for something, they don’t get it. So users will over ask, and IT will do a data dump, overwhelming the business users. It's not a pretty waltz and is something more akin to Ben Stiller’s salsa attempt in Along Came Polly. To make BI more successful, the data has to be relevant to the business and to the individual user. Let’s take the example of 1-800 CONTACTS, a winner of TDWI’s Best Practices Awards this year. IT staff at 1-800 CONTACTS worked closely with call center agents and their managers to understand the information agents needed to serve calls faster and better. They further developed reports and dashboards to display measures that drive performance bonuses. The reports were highly relevant to the business goals (customer service) and to the individual agents (compensation). I contrast this with another industry award winner who remarked “our call center would never use a BI tool. They don’t need it.” Sure, they don’t need sales revenue by region, because it’s not relevant to call center staff. Don’t expect call center staff to ask for BI either; they may have no idea how BI can help them. It’s up to the IT staff to understand enough of the business requirements to identify the opportunities. When IT does not have the time, resources or business acumen to do so, this is when you should engage a third-party consultant to help uncover those opportunities. This is the hard part of BI and something that no technology or software vendor can help you with. Let me know how you’ve helped make BI more business relevant at your company by writing me at cindihowson@biscorecard.com.  E-MAIL | SLASHDOT | DIGG This is a public forum. CMP Technology and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. CMP Technology makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers. Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP Technology's Terms of Service. Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or solicitations of business.
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