Business Intelligence – Wherefore Art Thou?

by Dave Melbye

ERP systems have an interesting character flaw. They are very, very good at generating and storing data (just ask your IT director how his or her storage needs have changed since your ERP system went live), and not very good at all at producing information. To be fair, the same could be said of CRM, GIS, or EAM systems, but let’s pick on ERP for the time being because its more widely deployed than just about any other enterprise-class technology.

Fact: Most governments overestimate the ability of managers and others to write their own queries or generate their own reports.

Fact: Very few of the analysts and decision-makers in any given organization truly understands how data is organized, exactly where it is stored, or how to get at it.

Fact: Depending on who you talk to, you will get different answers when you ask what a certain data element actually represents.

The problem, in a nutshell, is how to generate value from all that data that your ERP system is happily generating.

Software vendors, no slouches in this area, have data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) tools that purport to solve this problem. Condensing vast amounts of data into intelligible pools of information, they also have colorful dashboards and other tools to help you focus on key indicators and measures for your organization. In other words, they can help make your multi-million dollar investment that much more valuable.

And yet….we see few governments using BI tools. We are told that they are too difficult to understand, too expensive, too technically complex. They require more resources than are available for support. One IT director told me that BI would never work at his government because “it would force us to know something about our data”.

BI tools can turn your ERP system from a great big transaction processor into a valuable decision support system. There is a business case to BI that transcends cost and complexity. If you skipped BI, go back and take a look. If you’re still early in the shopping process, add it to your requirements.