BI Data Life-Cycle: Consume

This is the latest in a series of articles discussing the life-cycle of business intelligence (BI) data. We've been discussing a model with four main stages: Capture, Process, Consume, and Archive. This article introduces consumption of the data.

Once we have the processed our raw data, we’re ready to interact with it in order to try to understand what’s going on with our business. This step of the process, the actual interaction with and consumption of our data, is what most people think of as business intelligence, if they think of it at all. How you consume the data depends on a number of different things: the size of your business, your stake in that business, and the kinds of questions you want to answer.

If your business is small or you run a small business unit in a bigger company, you’re probably intimately involved with your data at a pretty detailed level. For one thing, you’re probably out there in the trenches with your customers every day. You need to know things like your costs and margins so that you can make quick adjustments in negotiations. For another thing, you probably can’t afford a dedicated analyst at this stage. On the other hand, if you’re in a bigger business, there’s probably more of a division of labor between the higher-level managers and the knowledge workers (whom the managers can probably now afford). The boss doesn’t want to be intimately involved in the gory details, and if you’re the knowledge worker you probably don’t want him or her to be intimately involved either.

The kind of stake you hold in the business also has a lot to do with how you consume the data. The general rule here is: the higher you are in the organization, or the farther away you are from it, the less detail you need. All shareholders usually want or need is what they get in the quarterly and annual reports released by a corporation. These are mainly static reports about things like profit and loss and changes in cash flow. The corporation’s board of directors really doesn’t need much more than that; mainly the board needs sufficient data at a high level to help the directors determine whether the business strategy they approved is working or not. The CEO needs a little more detail, and the different business unit managers need still more detail about their units, and so it goes.

As you become more comfortable with your data you may find that you want to ask more and different kinds of questions. Everyone starts out with “how much did we make last month?” but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. To really understand your business you’ll eventually start to ask more complicated things like:

• Who are our best customers?
• Where do our sales really come from?
• What are our most profitable product offerings?
• Which products should we discontinue?
• How do we get the most out of our advertising dollars?
• . . . and a host of others

What we’ll see is that we consume data differently depending on the kinds of questions we want to ask. Later, we’ll discuss at some length five main ways that we consume data and talk about the tools that are available for each type or class of data consumption.

Next we'll wrap up our discussion of the life-cycle with a word about archiving.