BI for the little guy

Business intelligence has traditionally been a term used exclusively by big multinational companies with huge amounts of data, big systems to house it all, and expensive consultants to make it all work. Traditionally, it was because big companies had the systems to collect all the data and therefore the slicing and dicing of it became necessary. That’s not the case anymore. As smaller companies made investments in CRM, ERP and other systems they started collecting data that needs as much slicing and dicing as the big guys.

From a technology side, a few of the latest trends and concepts in BI are Dashboards and Datamarts. Let me explain:

Dashboards: There were two words that used come to mind with regard to end user BI tools: clunky and unreliable. The latest generation of end user tools are really slick – and you don’t need to be an MIT grad to figure out how to use them. Today, everyone from the CEO on down can have their own personal dashboard where they can view, manipulate, filter, slice or dice whatever flavour of information that’s meaningful for them. That’s a huge step forward.

Datamarts: The original BI concept was the Data Warehouse – great if you’ve got tons of storage space and tons of time to wait while your data was crunched because that guy in accounting was pulling of his monthly report. The new concept is a Datamart where small subsets of the Data Warehouse are compartmentalized (typically around KPIs and business units). You might have a Datamart for HR, one for Finance, one for Sales, etcetera - aligning them with business units really reduces the load on the system and therefore the time it takes to crunch data.

The bottom line? As these smaller (and even the bigger) companies become more mature and can create measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), the need for fast, easy to use and reliable Business Intelligence tools is going to continue to grow.