Business Intelligence Defined

Professional people in the BI world like to toss around acronyms and technical terms. I like to do that myself. But for most of my career I didn’t really have a good definition for what I was doing. When I would tell people what I did for a living I would focus on the technical parts. They would look at me as if I’d just arrived from a nearby star. So a few years ago I went looking for a useful definition of BI and found this:

. . . the integrated and coordinated application of business information in order to comprehensively improve products, service, profits and the long-term health and growth of a company.

- Lee DeVries, "Improving Performance with the BI Quotient", DM Review, February 2007

Let’s look at a few important things in this definition.

First, successful BI is “integrated and coordinated.” Too often, in companies big and small, people in different business areas have their own little stashes of data that they don’t share with anyone else. Or if they do share, they don’t calculate their figures the same way anyone else does. How often have you heard the boss exclaim: “I wish I knew which of these sales figures is the right one!” How often have you been that boss? So both data and the definitions of what the data mean need to be shared.

Second, successful BI is “comprehensive.” This sort of follows from the “integrated and coordinated” part of the definition in the previous paragraph, but goes farther. The point of sharing data and the definitions for what the data mean is so that you can get the biggest and best possible picture of the whole business. The better you do this, the easier (and cheaper) it will be to understand how the different parts of the business fit together. This doesn’t mean you try to do it all at once, especially if you have time and budget constraints.

Lastly, successful BI is “long-term.” This means it’s not just a project that is done and checked off a list, and maybe you look at it again next quarter or next year. Business intelligence is a program that you commit to for the long haul the way you commit to quality or customer service. You don’t commit to those things? Okay, whatever. The fact that most businesses have to implement business intelligence incrementally, as we hinted at in the last paragraph, makes the long-term commitment aspect that much more important.

Next time: Business intelligence, the very unauthorized biography.