Business intelligence (BI) is everywhere. It’s more accessible. It’s mobile. It’s in the cloud. It runs in real time. It’s part of “Big Data” and small data. Simply put, BI surfaces, in one shape or another, in a tangled, twisted, and integrated way everywhere in our everyday lives.
In this new series, I want to take a different approach in my writing than what I usually do and explore the concept of BI from a “consumer” perspective. I’m changing the viewpoint, just as the movie Toy Story did for toys. I want to look at examples (both real and fictitious) to examine how they effectively deliver bite-size information to consumers.
To take it up a notch, I want to go beyond a standard practice of just writing about the topic by using each occasion as an excuse to include digital sketches, designs, or screenshots that may or may not exist in real life. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Everyday BI Is About Impact
I see the theme of everyday BI as delivering value to consumers by using some of the same techniques often utilized in business settings where the applications of BI are most dominant and readily available. In this context, value to me represents the insight that the consumers gain out of a data set that is delivered to them in a format that is simple, easy, and ready to be consumed.
Everyday BI Is Technology Neutral
Although the applications of everyday BI solutions will need to leverage many of the latest technologies I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I’ll neither focus on any specific technology nor will I describe a technical solution in this series.
Instead, I’ll focus on its use case and simply assume that data can be captured, stored, and transformed digitally to become “insight ready.” Moreover, I’ll stay technology neutral in design experiments.
Everyday BI Is About Value and Actionable Insight
As I do in my professional presentations, I’ll be keen to articulate the value proposition no matter how simple the design may appear to be. I want to be able to effectively answer at least two questions: Why will this information be helpful to me? And how can I use it to make better-informed decisions to improve the quality of my life? (And it doesn’t matter how small or large the impact may be, whether a penny per transaction to millions of dollars a year.)
Everyday BI Is a Virtual Experiment
Consider this an invitation to my virtual BI laboratory, where we’ll experiment with how BI and data in general can be used in our everyday lives using some of the principles of design thinking. Walk with me as we draw digital sketches on a virtual whiteboard that happens to be located inside a blog.
Don’t let the format of a blog post hold back your imagination. You’ll be surprised to find out how dispersed BI really is throughout our lives. And you may even come up with a few ideas or creations of your own in the process.
If we accept that BI is defined as a framework to enable organizations to make faster, better informed decisions for growth and profitability, then everyday BI is what allows consumers (everyday people) to make faster, better-informed decisions about their lives.
Stay tuned for the next installment of my Everyday BI series.
By Kaan Turnali, EPM Contributor, from: http://www.the-decisionfactor.com/business-intelligence/everyday-bi-introduction/
As Global Senior Director, Business Intelligence (BI), for SAP’s Global Customer Operations (GCO) Reporting & Analytics Platform, Kaan Turnali is responsible for the development, oversight, and execution of strategy for the BI platform across GCO’s worldwide user base. In addition, he manages special mobile BI projects for the Office of co-CEO Bill McDermott and the GCO senior management team. Prior to joining SAP in 2006, he worked as a senior BI consultant specializing in strategy, design, and development of enterprise BI solutions for SMEs and Fortune 500 companies. His background and experience in the integration of business and technology span over two decades. He is also an adjunct professor, teaching BI in the doctor of business administration program at Wilmington University. See Kaan’s articles on EPM Channel here.
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