Better BI

Business Intelligence - the Noun

Information and insights that business decision makers distill from their data and employ in decision-making.

Business Intelligence - the Verb

Activities involved in acquiring, analyzing, presenting, and communicating the information and insights.

Better Business Intelligence

Better BI^TM combines decades of experience with modern data analysis tools into a coherent approach that improves upon traditional BI by emphasizing the delivery of timely, actionable, high quality information through a constant emphasis upon providing the best possible information to business decision makers in the shortest possible time.

Traditional Business Intelligence

Traditional BI has failed to deliver value commensurate with the time, energy, effort, money, and resources organizations have expended in its pursuit. There are many reasons for these problems.

Better BI eliminates or minimizes Traditional BI's problems.

Better BI provides these benefits:

Delivers immediate and continuous value
Analytics are delivered in hours or days, not weeks or months; new insights are constantly achieved.
Highest quality analytics
provide enhanced identification and communication of essential business insights.
Measurable and manageable progress
Better BI provides multiple channels of progress information.
Reduced risk
Immediate and constant delivery provides continual business value feedback and risk mitigation. Transparent internal processes reduce operational risks of non-value contributing activities. Financial risks are minimized.
Enhanced organizational adoption
Dramatic improvements in organization-wide adoption of analytical data-based decision making.
Better strategic support
Emphasis on enabling organization-wide business intelligence provides the fertile ground necessary to support strategic goals and plans.
Reduced cost
Practicing Better BI within Enterprise BI can reduce the cost to deliver a given set of business analytics by 40% or more. Alternatively, a given expenditure can deliver double the amount of actionable, high value information and insights when Better BI is fully employed.

Problems with traditional BI include:

Excessive time to delivery.
Poor return on investment.
Suboptimal identification and communication of important business insights.
Lost focus – technical implementation dominates, business needs abandoned.
Elevated risk of failure.

Better BI consolidates the lessons of decades of experience in delivering critical business analytics, advances in the conduct of developing software-based systems, and the modern generation of data analysis tools and technologies, into a coherent approach to delivering the best possible business analytics in the shortest possible time.

The tremendous amount of time, energy, effort, money, and resources required to analyze the business and its data, and design, build, test, and deploy the marts, warehouses, ETL processes business semantics. business analytics, and associated governance and management policies and procedures before any analytics get delivered to business decision makers have real and substantial adverse consequences.

Traditional BI's paradigm is that of enterprise-scale integrated data warehouses and technology stacks capable of supporting full-spectrum data analysis from the highest level aggregates all the way down to transactional data.

This approach grew out of the need to provide data stores more amenable to business data analysis than the relational databases at the heart of business information systems, along with the BI software providing the exploratory and analytical functionality.

Given the necessity of transforming operational business data into the dimensional models required for analysis traditional BI's natural evolution was to grow larger and more comprehensive, with broader data reach requiring more substantial and complex ETL processes. At the same time, the BI software platforms' capabilities were expanded, driving up their size, complexity, and cost of acquisition and implementation.

Over the past two decades traditional BI has become synonymous with these very large, very complex enterprise-wide strategic systems positioned as the one true way for business decision makers to gain access to the critical business information and insights they need from their organization's data.

This strategic business goal of providing the right information to the right business people at the right time is the whole point of Business Intelligence. The traditional BI paradigm has the significant flaw of emphasizing large scale at the expense of serving the real purpose of BI. Organizations that embark on traditional BI—Big BI—journeys tend to find themselves suffering from a common set of maladies.