Using BI tools to turn information into action.

AuthorFitzgerald, Bob
PositionSpecial Report: Business Intelligence - Business intelligence

At the core of business intelligence (BI) is the ability to efficiently access and analyze corporate data in ways that look between the rows and columns on a spreadsheet. Today's tools have morphed from highly complex systems, understood only by the finance department, to simple but powerful software solutions allowing anyone in the enterprise to create reports relevant to their view of the business.

While technology can't fix ethical problems, it can help financial management keep up with today's pressures of speed, complexity and legal requirements to ensure financial integrity. It's not enough to focus solely on regulatory reporting. The latest BI solutions are taking a step up to provide all the information management needs to run business smarter.

Getting Data to Pull its Own Weight

A typical company harnesses only 2 to 4 percent of the data that resides in its systems, notes IBM Corp. The rest sits in databases and is never touched. In the 1990s, companies sat on gold mines of data silos and distributed data marts filled with inaccessible information.

Getting an up-to-date report required chasing information from multiple departments and relying on finance to do the analysis. This inevitably led to time delays, and left corporate decision-makers to ask questions such as: "Where are all the details relevant to my current situation? Is this information accurate? What can I learn from it?"

Consider the many functions within an organization -- human resources, marketing, IT -- each with its own unique activities and data sets. Managers and departmental users need the ability to capture an accurate picture of this data across the organization. Historically, finance has been the only department with access to consistent details about a company's latest reports. The challenge lies in translating this expertise to the rest of the organization and turning transactional data into a user-friendly tool for strategic decision-making.

Another problem is the misuse of spreadsheets for decision support. Today, many billion-dollar enterprises are still relying on spreadsheets to produce budgets, forecasts, revenue reports and other financial statements.

Spreadsheets are fine for individual modeling and reporting, however, these tools have limitations. They are inherently vulnerable to errors, which increase with the complexity of the model. A simple data entry error could throw off a large program by millions of dollars.

Most notably, spreadsheets...

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