Building bridges
Training, in fact, is one critical but often inadequately addressed aspect of any BI implementation. It's not enough just to show users how a tool works; they must also be trained in the interrelationships between various business organisations and metrics, since the BI system may very well expose them to big-picture information that's much more broadly based than their individual perspective.
"Business intelligence is a line of business project; it is not an IT project," says Ursula Paddon, market manager for IBM data management. "It has to be a business led project run in co-operation with IT. It's an iterative process: you develop business rules, manage the data and get it coming, then do a gap analysis and build on your original implementation. It is one hell of a learning curve for every organisation, but it's absolutely phenomenal what comes out of it."
Many companies are just starting to see what that means. One of the increasingly frequent results of such lateral thinking has been the extension of BI systems out to business partners who have traditionally been excluded because they lie outside the four walls.
Such BI extranets are proving to be a tremendously successful way of bringing partners closer, improving communication throughout the supply chain, and keeping partners and customers longer by creating expectations that your competitors can't match.
The UK arm of mobile carrier Vodafone, for example, uses Business Objects technology to offer its customers self-service access to detailed usage statistics. In the US, Zurich Insurance is using the same technology to let customers like Ford Motor Company dig through mountains of information relating to claim statistics, risk calculations, and the like.
"Many businesses have spent a lot of money on CRM and ERP implementations, and they've got this great data that would be very useful to their customers and suppliers," explains Joel Weingarten, vice president and general manager of Business Objects' extranet business unit.
"BI extranets represent a way that they can go that last mile and get that full utility out of this valuable BI information. You're really helping customers help you, and every time they log on they're dynamically connected to the freshest data they can access based on their security profile."
Extranets are already well-understood beasts, and extending the paradigm to business intelligence has become much easier as vendors combine the two approaches.
They can be used to engender closer teamwork between individual departments that may have built their own BI systems but lack a broader context for their systems. They can also provide excellent value-add, requiring relatively little additional effort, for companies seeking to augment the range of services they offer their customers.
For SMS marketing company 5th Finger, building a BI extranet has been an excellent way of adding value to its product offering, says director Steen Andersson.
Earlier this year, the company used Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET to build a system that lets its customers--which include companies like Channel V, Guinness, and McDonalds--log in at any point during a marketing campaign to see exactly how it's progressing and learn more about the customers that have responded so far.
"We always saw SMS as great, but what's exciting about it as a marketing tool is the information you can gather about customers," explains Andersson.
"We can design standard reports and let clients log in to see live updates. It's really getting quite practical, down to helping [Channel V] make more money because they can tell their advertisers that this particular show got x thousand entries."
Equally dramatic change came after a BI extranet set up by GrainCorp, a NSW grain handler that's used Business Objects technology to provide more than 3000 farmers with direct online access to a range of regularly updated reports. For example, GrainCorp tracks and can publish KPIs such as the number of tonnes it's processing per man-hour, the cost in dollars per tonne, and truck turnaround time.
This information is invaluable for helping farmers plan where to bring their grain, and GrainCorp information services manager Brian Dickinson thanked the system's rapid adoption for a winter harvest of 11 million tonnes-higher than the expected 10.5 million tonnes. Next year, the system will be available to up to 5000 growers and 200 buyers.
By extending BI reporting outside the conceptual limits of a company's four walls, extranets will also serve another purpose: paving the philosophical way for a new generation of more distributed analytics Web services.
US company Epistemic, for example, this month launches its Java-based Epistemic Analytics Toolkit, which bundles a modular BI suite that's exposed to applications as an online Web service.
This approach, which is also possible through Business Objects' recently launched Web Services SDK, effectively brings the analytics to the data instead of sending the data to the analytics. That will allow heavy BI users to provide a common analytics engine to multiple departments, eliminating redundancy and potentially facilitating ad hoc queries from users anywhere in the world.
Companies are constantly looking for new ways to improve communication up and down the supply chain, and the flexibility provided by extranets and Web services now provide an excellent option for making that happen.
While it's still in early days in Australia, increased intimacy between corporate BI systems and online customer should increase rapidly as appropriate technologies and business cases become more evident. That will handily push BI into its next major phase--the latest in a long line of improvements that are helping businesses learn things they never knew about themselves.
