What's it all about, anyway?

How do you define Business Intelligence?

For the last few years, I've been working with businesses across North America, as part of Business Intelligence (BI) projects and deployments. And yet I have always struggled to concisely explain just what BI is. But I think I'm getting close.

Business Intelligence is a great addition to the technology lexicon - it makes those of us involved in setting up this stuff feel like we're doing something new and revolutionary! But the simple truth is that Business Intelligence isn't really new; it's really just about something we chose to ignore.

Anyone can make a decision. But to make a good decision, we really want/need information. GOOD information. Timely, relevant information. And that's what BI is all about. Information.

So when someone asks me what I do, from now on my answer is going to be that I solve information problems. It doesn't sound so pretentious, and I think it's pretty accurate.

SMBs need BI, too!

BI is not just for big companies!

Over the last six or seven years, I've been involved in providing and implementing Business Intelligence technologies to clients in small businesses. Sometimes, we didn't call it 'BI', but in most cases it really was.

In recent years, many vendors have come forward to talk about having BI 'solutions' (uuggh - I hate that term) for SMBs, but the problem is that they tend to forget the 'S' in SMB. What about the business that doesn't do $300M p.a. in sales?

The reality is that those (not so) small businesses, can definitely reap great benefits from a well thought-out BI implementation. The key is in finding a good place to create value.

Example #1: One of our clients is a distributor of Pet Foods to retailers across Eastern Canada. Their products are sold to independents, large chains, and to several buying groups. They have a team of salespeople, and seem to have order-entry staff working constantly.

The Problem: With such a diverse sales channel, how can you effectively monitor sales for allocation to the appropriate salesrep? Also, with a significant opportunity to receive Vendor rebates based on product and Geo performance, how can you create valid reports to support claims?

How did we solve this? Well, not suprisingly for a business of this size in this market, we didn't build a comprehensive Enterprise Data Warehouse. We didn't implement costly ETL technology platforms, nor did we develop a model requiring dedicated staff FTE resources.

Before recommending a large-scale project of dubious value and return, we took some time to understand both the client's business and the value that could be realized from automating this manual process - how much time was going into doing this manually? How many days per month? We worked with them to determine the repercussions of 'hiccups' in processing - what would be the implications downtime for the system? And we collaborated with them in finding the best balance between budget, timeliness, and fault-tolerance.

In the end, we implement a collection of easily maintained, highly reliable SQL transformation jobs, in conjunction with BusinessObjects Crystal Reports Server. Total cost to the client? Well, let's just say that over the past four years, they have saved the cost of implementing and maintaining this system several times over. They can consistently recover rebates from their vendors. And in addition, they now have a reliable sales information repository!!!

So how does this relate to my initial point, about BI for SMBs? Quite simply, it is not always a matter of considering a large scale project, spanning all aspects of a business, in order to achieve value from Business Intelligence. Implementing BI definitely has a cost, as does any technology. But the issue is to find appropriate ways to offset that cost by generating business value. At some later date, I will no doubt reference the intangible value of Business Intelligence. But for now, let's remember that it is quite possible to justify BI in any size of business.

You don't need to be a global giant to find an ROI.

What this is about...

A lot of large software vendors are promoting themselves as providing Business Intelligence solutions appropriate for SMBs, but here's my issue - while the solutions are generally functionally and financially appropriate for the upper end of this market space, the reality is that they are not generally an affordable option at the lower end.

For clarification, I better share my definition of the market we're talking about.

Generally (and obviously with exceptions), when I think of mid-sized businesses, I'm thinking of those from about $25 million per annum revenue, and going up to about $350M in annual revenue. I realize that annual revenue is a fairly arbitrary defining characteristic, however people like having boundaries, so there you have it. Under $25 million, generally there is not the scope of business operations to warrant much in the way of sophisticated BI, and over $350M, realistically we're no longer dealing with a mid-sized business.

As the president of a consulting firm implementing BI solutions in the mid-market, I'm hoping I can use my experience to give some insight into viable BI for smaller businesses, and how to get value from appropriate solutions.

And yes, I'll also share my opinion about industry trends and changes for those who care to read them :)

Stay tuned!