Posts Tagged ‘Intentionality’
Business Intelligence is about Intentionality
For the 702nd time today, I heard Business Intelligence referred to as the latest greatest new shiny answer to “reporting.”
It’s so common to imagine that if a company just purchases some expensive tool, they’ll get an awesome reporting solution. Or, the more mature companies think that if they get some processes in place, learn some best practices, add some responsibilities to a couple of their staff, and maybe buy a new tool, then they’ll have access to vital data in their new beautiful reports or dashboards. Closer.
Still more mature … If we do everything company B is doing above AND we have a data warehouse in place that implements at least the basics of dimension modeling best practices, surely then we’ll be golden … right?
Well, I have to say: no. This is all good stuff I’m hearing, but my concern is the entirely wrong focus of all of it. The bottom line is that BI is not about reporting, it’s about intentionality.
The purpose of Business Intelligence is to put in place the discipline (synonym for intentionality) to convert an organization’s unique data into vital knowledge assets by which the leaders of that organization can make better decisions. What you build when you build BI is this discipline, not some reporting infrastructure … no matter how advanced. What you get when you build it is a set of lenses—reports, dashboards, scorecards, applications, widgets, portals, etc—through which you can make better decisions to advance the mission / goals of your business.
