The Great Debate: Business Intelligence - Seconding Speeches

Having worked in so called "BI" for the last 20 years and worked across Enterprise, Mid Market and SME customers, you realise that the term BI is confusng and like all IT terms avoids the business issues.

Managers across all organisations of ALL sizes have the identical issues, it's just degrees of variation. Everyone needs to meet three fundamental management reporting requirements :

Can I produce month end report packs as soon as period end finishes for internal, investor and statuatory purposes easily, nicely formatted and with guaranteed accuracy ?

Can I see where I am winning or losing in my business, identify good and adverse trends and make informed judgement considering historical trends and future predictions ?

Can I communicate company, cost centre, departmental and individual reports in a way that provides consistency and focus across the company ?

In the Enterprise space the key issues surrounding the above are often performance and data quality related and sensibly handling and distilling huge quantities of data to possibly hundreds or thousands of users. Ease of use is of paramount importance as for any sector, however ease of setup is not so critical - either consultants can be deployed or the company has skiiled IT resource.

In the Mid Market and SME markets the issues are around hiding the complexities and power of "BI" and reporting tools and guaranteeing ease of setup as often there is no IT Department or speciallised database / OLAP consultants. At Excel in Business www.excelinbusiness.biz , we try and do this for the Sage 200 and 1000 platforms so that reporting and analysis cycles are fully automated and users can focus back on the business and the results rather than collating and preparing information in the first place.

So I would argue and have seen first hand by being involved in over 600 projects that BI is appropriate for all sectors. In the SME sector however the application that "runs" and reports on the business needs to be delivered in a packaged best practise way and not "what are your requirements"and we can "build you a solution". The latter will definitely fail in the SME sector and which is something maybe the Gartner view is based on ?

Ignoring the technology for a moment and looking at SME's in general, one of the prime reasons that so many go to the wall each year is due to the lack of financial information. Colin Barrow of Cranfield School of Management in his Book Practical Financial Management (Kogan Page Ltd) identifies this lack of information as the prime reason that SME's fail. Surveyors Colin has performed show relative poor understanding of basic measure like ROCE, ROSC, Quick Ratio, Current Ratio, with SME owners and managers. These are the very matrices that BI can address.

Any tool or effort that improves the information available to a SME will help in its overall survival and must therefore be endorsed and encouraged.

Being a systems developer of SME Business Management software – Acceptum Business Software - an ERP package for SME’s; which incorporates an in-built BI module; I am sure that the ability to easily monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) as part of a managers regular routine is key to the overall financial success of a SME. In Acceptum the matrices given above can all be obtained and monitored on a regular basis from data entered into the software from daily transactions – Sales Orders/Ledger postings/Budgets/etc. Yes it is backward looking, relying on data entered, but it is far better to have these limited measure at a managers finger tips than to be in a situation of a company failing due to lack of pertinent information.

Most ‘accounting’ software used by SME’s do not currently provide this ability; and so the monitoring of KPIs is overlooked or forgotten. In such an environment the need for ‘specialist BI software’ to produce this KPI information easily becomes seen as a luxury ‘we don’t need’ / ‘managed alright up to now without it’.

This brings us to the other primary area that both sides have pointed out and that Colin Barrow attempts to address with his book; that is the education of SME owners and managers to understand basic business matrices and how BI tools/software in any guise can help produce the data to assist and enhanced the KPI monitoring processes.

Poor education in the user population is no reason to ‘withhold’ software tools that can remove ignorance and enhance financial performance.