Goal of BI

In a couple of days i've a small presentation for a starting up business unit Business intelligence at the Future group and some people are presenting their ideas, definitions, methodlogies, frameworks, etc. I'll be talking about what Business Intelligence should be, what are the goals of BI, etc. Just a plain presentation in 10 minutes that will feed some discussion. So i started googling 'Business Intelligence': 38.100.000 hits. Hmmmm quite a lot. I searched some Wikipedia's, sites etc that would give some direction for a presentation. After a half a hour (and years of experience off course;-) ) i concluded: there's no red line in Business Intelligence. Discussion about Business Intelligence spreads all kind of directions. So i decided that i try to tell what Business Intelligence is from my point of view. Here is my opinion.

So what is Business Intelligence all about? I think there a couple of goals of Business Intelligence:

• Decision support. This is the most familiar goal of business intelligence. Helping the business making decisions better. What is a better decision? Good question. Some cultures in organisations will enhance decision making with a good ground. Some won't. For some organisations a highly skilled BICC will have great impact and for some it won't. Sure it also depends on the information shown. A Red traffic light blinking on your screen make sure it will attract your attention. So information ergonomics is important here. Principles of colour, Gestallt, use of UI components are important. In a later blog i will go deeper into that.
• Keeping record of what has been happened in the past for purposes like learning (why did this happen?), auditing (did we do the right thing?) and trends (where are we going?).
• Influencing the behaviour of people (Frank Buytendijk). Currently reading his book 'Performance leadership' and i will go into detail later on.

Ok that  was it for now..

Greetz,
Hennie