Business Intelligence is not a solution to your business problems!!

Damn! I should have chosen some other heading for the post or posted it anonymously. :P

Some BI enthusiasts and some die hard BI fans must be wanting to kill me over this. However, please know, I am one too, and before you make up your mind, allow me to explain first.

Let’s take an example of an automobile company ARM Motors Ltd.

Assume that the profits of ARM are continuously dropping since last year. Now, the management team is worried and gathered to find out the issues. They have some data here and there, on the basis of which they are trying to make some sense, to find out probable causes, and remedies. It’s become a real mess though as they have been using different legacy systems, complete data is not available, whatever is available is not available at one single location. Basically there is no single version of truth.

Now, CIO/CTO proposes we have a BI system and BI would solve our problems.

They discuss, finalize, and implement a BI solution. And after some 6 months or a year, they observe the bleeding is stopped. Profits have started increasing a little.

You would say, I am contradicting with the heading, BI did solve the business problem.

WAIT. What happened in fact is – BI enabled the decision makers to identify the actual problems and to take the corrective action.

When the BI solution was implemented, the relevant stakeholders were made available with the data they needed, in the format required, and at the time it was necessary. Due to this, they could find out what was the root cause of drop in profits – let’s say it was drop in sales that too only in a couple of big territories out of 8-10 they operate in, and probably because of the campaigns the competitors were carrying out in the region.

Now that they had identified the problem, all they needed is to take a corrective action only in case of those 2 territories. (This corrective action is the solution to the problem!!)

In absence of BI, probably it wouldn't be possible to identify the root cause or even if it is found out, it would probably be difficult to identify the bleeding points and they might end up taking corrective actions in all territories which probably would cause another problems.

BI just enables to find out right information, to the right person, at the right time, at the right place to help and improve the informed decision making in order to solve the issues business might be facing.

So, the argument I am trying to make is Business Intelligence is not a solution to your business problems, it is a tool or a step to identify and solve those.

What would help if you are hungry – only making a pizza or making and eating a pizza??