Business Intelligence Needs to Support the Front Lines

James Taylor, Vice President of Product Marketing/Management at Fair Isaac runs an excellent blog called Enterprise Decision Management. Recently, he posted about an article from Informatics about businesses not understanding business intelligence.

Nigel Rayner says:

BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management.

Mr. Taylor expands that comment to say that,

not only does it not address the needs of senior management, it does not support the needs of operational staff either. Not management, not analysts, but people working on the front lines helping customers. It also does not help the software that support customers.

When using business intelligence, it's always important to define the end results and the goals of the endeavors. Data that goes directly to the senior management doesn't necessarily mean that it makes people more efficient, infrastructure more manageable or the company more competitive.

BI (business intelligence) is the process of obtaining data from various sources, but that endeavor must be driven by the goals and real issues that companies face. One of the litmus tests of any BI driven decisions must be: how it helps operations from the bottom up.

This article has intrigued me, I added his blog to my RSS reader and I'm going to do some serious back reading on it. It seems that every article I read from him inspires a few questions.