Business Intelligence Tools

Business Intelligence (BI) Tools are being used by many companies to improve business performance by making best use of data statistics, analytics and reporting tools to make better decisions. Business Intelligence strategy is driven by the organization’s business objectives and desired goals. It should be aligned with the organization’s business strategies. It includes a broad set of processes, technologies for collecting, integrating, accessing and analyzing information for the purpose of helping the enterprise make better business decisions. BI solutions should enable users to be able to quickly adapt to new business requirements and evolving sources of information. Improved information management could increase the company’s competitive advantage and performance optimization.

Once management has decided on what BI tools to adapt, everyone in the organization is expected to support it knowing that it is geared toward improving the organization’s processes and eventually financial performance. To encourage more effective use of business intelligence tools the people in the organization has to understand how BI can make them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. It is important that the BI user in the organization understand how it fits in the mission and vision of the organization. Lack of BI strategy could lead to frustrated employees who cannot get timely answers to their business question.

I believe pay raises and sanctions should be a result of an employee’s overall performance vs. preset targets/benchmarks on major key result areas and other performance factors. Pay raises should not be an incentive to make use of BI applications alone. The company can choose to make  the use of BI applications as one of the areas for performance appraisal. The employees should use the BI applications that management deem appropriate to meet the company’s goals. I believe the use of BI tools should be mandatory and not optional to the employees once the company decides to adapt it.

After all, everyone in the company can eventually benefit in the results of the use of BI such as time and cost savings and higher income from the company’s business operations.