Manifesto for Better Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence's virtue is its ability to provide meaningful, valuable, data-based information and insights into the state of an organization. This information and these insights are valuable only to the extent to which they provide decision makers the opportunity to make effective decisions about their business.

Traditional Big BI has failed to deliver adequate value in return for the extensive investments of time, energy, effort, resources, and money required to implement it.

There is a better way.

Better BI concentrates on delivering the best possible analytics in the shortest possible time. Based on decades of experience, adopting and adapting the best modern tools and methodologies, Better BI values:

People and collaboration	over	processes and tools
Low impedance data analysis	over	high-threshold technologies
Immediate analytics delivery	over	schematics and designs
Responding to change	over	following a plan
Minimizing the distance between people and data	over	minimizing the unit cost of technical resources
Professional skill and ability	over	on the job learning

Information has time value. Business Intelligence professionals are obligated to minimize the distance between decision makers and the information and insights available from their data. Better BI embraces the primacy of the delivery of information, recognizes the importance of adopting a model of early and continuous information delivery, and values activities and technologies in proportion to their support of the primary goal.

Better BI in practice

Better BI advocates the value of the following:

Constant interaction with business decision makers in order to satisfy their information needs.
Ruthlessly keeping a focus on information delivery, immediately and continually.
Intimate analytics as the mechanism for reducing the distance between business decision makers and insights into their data.
High quality analytic information design as a critical element in communicating the stories the data has to tell.
High quality analytics developed in close collaboration with business decision makers, via intimate analytics, serve as the information designs for enterprise BI systems.

Better BI extends the traditional data warehouse-based business intelligence paradigm. The traditional model tends to shift the perspective of the BI initiative away from delivering information towards developing the highly complex technology infrastructure that will ultimately (hopefully) deliver valuable information.

People Are Smart

People have the ability to make sense of less-than-perfect data.

All BI is local

Information is valuable within the local business context provided by the business's data.

Deliver Value Early and Often

High quality business analytics delivered immediately.
Normally within hours.