Many things to many people
If you were to ask a business person, BI professional or Google "What is Business Intelligence"; you'll get a multitude of answers (Google returns 169 million results, thankfully "define: Business Intelligence" returns only 6) some of which are:
- Fact based decision making
- Optimisation of business processes
- Automated exception reporting
- Ability to perform "ad-hoc" or "what-if" analysis
It is my belief that all of these are valid answers but individually they fail to describe what I feel is the central purpose of any BI solution, namely that it enables an organisation to effectively plan, monitor and improve.
Why Plan, Monitor and Improve?
If we are to look at all the actions an organisation needs to perform in order to satisfy its objectives I'd propose that they resolve down to these: plan, monitor and improve. Firstly the organisation needs to plan its objectives and how it will meet them; secondly it needs to monitor how it is performing in meeting these objectives and thirdly to improve on that performance.
Where does this leave us in our search for a definition?
Any solution that is able to assist in the execution of any of these three actions could be considered to be Business Intelligence however these are only partial answers and will not deliver the fullest benefit to the organisation. Any definition that similarly is too narrow in focus also suffers from the problem of not conveying the breadth of what BI is and how it is able to affect an organisation.
And the answer is...
So here's my definition: "A set of systems and processes that enable an organisation to effectively plan, monitor and improve". You never know - maybe it will be the seventh entry on the Google results for "define: Business Intelligence".
- RH
