Best-in-class BI – Display, Insight and Action

I was talking to a colleague about the benefits that an operational BI solution provides and we came to the conclusion there are three levels of increasing value:

1. Displaying relevant, timely, accurate data based on the person’s role and responsibility within the context of a business process or value stream;
2. Deriving insight and understanding by combining and calculating performance metrics, enabling interactive analysis and applying statistical analytics to those metrics;
3. Performing scenario analysis on possible actions and determining potential outcomes of those actions.

Each of these require specific capabilities, but the overriding factor that determines the amount of value being delivered is the ability for the intended audience to easily, quickly and effectively use the capabilities. 

For example:

• the display has to be tailored to each specific role, and the layout should be intuitive, highly interactive, visually appealing  and easily personalized;
• the analytics have to be easily applied and understood- by everyone making daily operational decisions and not just statisticians and analysts;
• the scenarios should be easily specified by change one or more metric values either with an absolute number or a percentage change; also the changes should be able to be combined and compounded as sometimes it is a serious of actions that will result in the desired outcome.

The other important aspect is the ability to embed guidance and best practices.  This includes:

• the definition of the metrics relevant to each role, and equally important, how those metrics should be calculated;
• in-context guidance that provides metric descriptions and how the information should be interpreted and applied within the context of the business processes and operational decisions;
• the reference points, targets or benchmarks those metrics should be compared with; and
• the best visualization and analytics to be applied to a specific metric based on its particular characteristics.

A best-in-class operational BI solution should deliver all three levels of BI value, with ease-of-use to ensure adoption by everyone making operational, and should provide the context and best practices to enable those people to extract maximum value and make optimal decisions.