Uncertain economic times create a heightened sense of awareness for most businesses. As a result, most organizations require more insight and measurement surrounding internal projects and initiatives in order to insure maximum ROI. In the past, identifying metrics, gathering data and monitoring the trends was a full time project in itself. With new business intelligence (BI) solutions this effort is greatly reduced and systems can be created to effectively monitor projects and track success.
William Copacino of Oco, Inc. recently wrote about Effective Business Intelligence for an Uncertain Economy in Industry Week. In his article he outlines 5 key BI trends that companies will rely on in 2009 and beyond. While his 5 key points are made regarding BI in general, his thoughts can be applied to many industries and projects. As an example, many organizations are undertaking Alternative Workspace (AWS) programs, such as hoteling, as a means of reducing real estate costs. Successfully implementing an AWS program touches on many different areas of an organization and often involves collecting and monitoring data from isolated systems. Combining Copacino’s key points with our AWS example provides further insight regarding how organizations can apply these concepts today.
Growth of Complementary BI
Common BI platforms within organizations have sometimes served as barriers to implementation and organizations are beginning to see the value in BI solutions for specific business needs. In many cases a BI platform is just that, a generic tool not focused on solving any specific business issue. BI tools are emerging in the marketplace to address specific business issues, such as alternative workspace. Combining data from facility databases, scheduling, and presence detection systems can give a complete view of the success and adoption of an AWS program. As an example, PeopleCube will be launching their workplace business intelligence solution shortly which is designed specifically to address space utilization performance and trends related to alternative workspace and other reserved space.
SaaS Goes Upmarket
Organizations of all sizes are under pressure to complete projects with reduced resources. Deploying in a SaaS model will become a necessity for many organizations lacking the resources to deploy and maintain more internal systems. In addition, technology has advanced to the point that methods for aggregating and summarizing data from disperse systems internally has gained acceptance within the walls of IT. Deployment of SaaS solutions has also become a critical part of many organizations’ disaster recovery plans.
Information Silos Will Tumble
Most solutions in place today are still transactional in nature. When analytical views are available they tend to be focused on transaction data available within the system. No one wants to add transaction data from one system into another and then build out more performance metrics. BI solutions provide the ability to take transaction data from various systems, aggregate and summarize the data in a more meaningful format and combine that data with data from other systems. In doing this, data is turned into information, which can be more easily visualized and monitored.
BI systems such as PeopleCube’s play a large role in consolidating information from different systems into a meaningful format without creating new system integration projects. Initially these systems will be focused in the area of facility management, resource scheduling and presence detection. Occupancy data, planned reservations, actual usage and visitor information will be pulled from various systems and combined with space and costing information to provide a means of effectively measuring internal use of resources. This will be the case for comparison between departments as well as collecting data for forecasting future trends and requirements, such as how much space will be needed when deploying AWS to a new region given a specific mix of employees by department and job function. While this would have required guess work in the past, it is easily measured when using BI to combine data from various systems.
Collaborative BI Throughout the Extended Enterprise
While extending these metrics outside the four walls of the enterprise will provide value for some industries, a greater value exists in comparing internal metrics externally. BI tools focused on specific business needs, such as AWS, provide a common method of measuring and monitoring success in a common format. This format can then be used to benchmark an organization against other companies in the same industry. This will be the true value of BI tools in the future, providing standard metrics to which organizations can compare their operations against industry norms.
Corporate Hot Spots Will Drive BI
With the current economic situation, only projects with substantial ROI and payback within a short period of time will be considered. AWS programs are hot projects in many companies because of the ability to reduce infrastructure costs and realize a substantial savings in little time. Even for growing organizations, AWS programs provide the ability to increase headcount without increasing real estate. While many companies launch pilot AWS programs, BI tools are a necessity to effectively monitor the success – and improve upon that success – of the pilot programs in future roll-outs.
BI solutions will have a major impact in 2009 for organizations with the vision to aggregate data from multiple systems and develop key metrics and measurements related to specific business objectives. Companies that continue to focus on BI platforms will be hampered by high deployment costs and delays from building solutions. SaaS deployment of BI systems can reduce IT involvement, avoid capital expenditure and decrease time of roll-out. Doing this allows organizations to outpace competitors and reduce costs.
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