Business Intelligence, known as BI, is an area of enterprise software and strategy focused on the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. This can be just-in-time data from business operations, market data, trends or any other business related information.

The prominence of BI has been rising in recent years, primarily due to the fact that more business data than ever is now available and we finally have reasonably priced systems for collecting and presenting that data.

The presentation of BI data is typically in the form of a Dashboard interface. Dashboards have been available in an enterprise setting since the late 90’s. While the polish of these offerings has improved, and there has been significant (in breadth) but slow movement toward open standards for dashboard elements (known as Widgets), there has been very little progress in improving the overall user experience and business value of the tool itself. Instead, the improvement in data, both in volume and quality, has driven most of the progress so far.

Open source projects such as Pentaho and JBoss portals are raising the status quo for the quality of the underlying infrastructure while companies like Mendix are driving the most significant interface and process-enhancing progress.

Smart, but could it drive you to irrelevance?

The opportunities made available by higher quality and highly relevant data can not be understated. Business Intelligence tools represent some of the most exciting possibilities in recent years, but it also has the potential to be the single biggest missed opportunity in the enterprise yet.

Do you remember the smartest kid in your school? (it may have been you — kudos!) There is always a sort of tragedy about just how smart a kid can be, as unless they posses the requisite social skills their smarts may never take them as far as a Ph.D and no further. More importantly, no matter how smart a person is, we all need to have a personal dream and vision, without those we lumber in obscurity.

The same is true for your company. In getting too smart about your business, there is a risk in alienating yourself from your staff, your partners and ultimately, your customers if you do not provide them with the ability to benefit from this new level of business data.

The Intelligence Funnel

Business Intelligence tools must be viewed as part of a stack strategy to not only improve business data, but to radically change how that data can be acted on. There are three core components of this strategy

Raw Business Intelligence

This is raw, real-time data from your operations. On-Time performance, costs, spend, etc. These are all critical data-points for monitoring the performance of your organization. The real-time nature of this data also means that you can react quickly to any trends or shifts that you observe.

Social Intelligence

Social Intelligence is your ability to understand what your customers, employees and partners perceive regarding your organization, product and strategy. The inability to listen closely is the achilles heel of the modern organization. So few resources are focused on listening and synthesizing information that the skill is almost non-existent.

Social Collaboration
This is the final, foundational, layer of your Intelligence Funnel. The volume of information you will be dealing with will mean it is a practical impossibility for a finite number of people to filter, manage and synthesize all of the available sources.

Your Intelligence Funnel will federate this component out as far in to your business network as possible. Can your restaurant managers do a better job of monitoring and troubleshooting your supply chain than your corporate staff can? Can your branch office staff provide more significant and timely feedback on the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign than a call center worker can? Will the clerk at your car rental shop have a better and more timely understanding of customer requests than your annual survey?

The list goes on, but the point is that the volume of data will continue to increase at an incredible rate and if you do not have a scalable plan in place to leverage that data than it will be both a wasted asset and eventually a liability and a cost driver.

New Business Processes
The end result of the Business Intelligence Funnel is the ability to identify, create and implement new business processes which are cheaper and better timed than what you are able to create and deploy now using a centralized model.