An airplane pilot will tell you that during times of turbulence and uncertainty are when they most rely on their instrumentation. During these uncertain financial times, when you can least afford a misstep, you have the greatest need to clearly view the health of your organization.
You need the certainty that comes from having the most pertinent information available and in a way that makes the most sense for your organization. You need collaboration tools that facilitate the active discussion about what is happening in your organization and what needs to happen.
You need to look for ways to reduce costs while you execute smarter and more strategically.
The Challenge
Senior leaders are trying to gain visibility into their organization’s operational and fiscal performance. Data is not the problem – there’s lots of data. But which data will provide the insights you require? And how can you get at it? How much time must you spend building reports from scratch? And, almost as frustrating, how long do you spend taking bits and pieces of current company management reports to get at what’s most important to you?
The challenge is to build a universally understood and accepted Business Intelligence (BI) system that provides the right data in the right way to help people across the firm make good decisions.
How Accurate Reporting & Analysis Can Improve Your Organization's Performance
BI is a powerful approach to harnessing the wide-ranging data that a typical organization is capable of producing. Building a strong BI system has been made easier with the availability of software written for this purpose and a growing body of BI expertise in the consulting and vendor communities. Rather than concentrating solely on the technological challenges of developing BI, however, savvy organizations start with the end in mind.
By first identifying the financial and operational measures that most closely align with firm strategy, capturing and massaging data into clear, actionable reports is made easier. Thus, implementing a BI 
system is as much art as it is science. Good data drives good decisions. The behaviors that are most desirable must be the ones the BI system supports. For small and midsized organizations looking to achieve greater leverage of their limited resources, an appropriately funded BI system may serve as a great investment toward achieving greater performance and improved profitability.
Leaders need financial information presented in a manner that enhances their management insight. If your reporting system is not meeting these basic needs, you should consider the impact that further investments in BI would make.
Technology Can Help
As a consultant who works primarily within the Microsoft world I’ve spent a large part of my career helping clients realize true business value from technology. I’ve found the technology offerings from SQL Server 2005/2008 (including SSIS, SSAS and SSRS), SharePoint 2007, and PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics (now included in SharePoint 2007 licenses, will be a part of SharePoint 2010) in addition to the desktop Office applications a great fit for delivering BI to and across an organization.
This technology stack provides a flexible platform upon which you can deliver business solutions that not only align with your organization’s strategic objectives, but also within the level of investment appropriate. I believe it’s okay to start small: Excel spreadsheets, manually populated and hosted within a SharePoint document library can be a solution profile that does not require CIO approval and can be effective in drumming up cross-organizational support. The real lift, however, comes when you can provide the self-service reporting and analysis functionality from multiple data sources – likely requiring a more advanced deployment.
This technology approach will not only provide greater access to BI capabilities, but proper integration with your existing SharePoint infrastructure will deliver insight alongside the search, collaboration and content management features.
It’s More Than the Technology
We all (should) know this, but it helps to repeat. It’s more than the technology. From my personal experience and from studying other reports, the organizational changes and business process changes are the most difficult to implement in a BI deployment.
“The greatest constraint… would be changing the basic business processes and behaviors of the organization and it’s people. That’s always the most difficult and time-consuming part of any major organizational change.”
– Competing on Analytics (Davenport, Harris; Harvard Business School Press)
Recognizing the change management effort up front will help present a more accurate program plan to your stakeholders reducing (but certainly not removing) the risk of failure. Working with an expert with experience in such an effort is highly suggested.
Additional Resources