Business intelligence is defined as: any information or insight that enables employees to operate or manage their organisation to greater success, through improved decision-making and enhanced strategic, tactical and operational insight.
This practical definition emphasises that business intelligence:
- Is information or insights.
- Enables or empowers employees to do their job better.
- Its purpose is to make organisations more successful.
- Success is achieved through better decision making and enhanced strategic, tactical and operational insight.
Other BI commentators argue that this definition should include references to the underlying business intelligence systems, applications and technologies used to generate the insights. I strongly disagree.
Distorting this definition by including references to BI technologies creates the serious risk that BI implementations will lose focus from the main purpose of making your organisation more successful, to creating shiny, technological superior systems that have low end user adoption rates because they provide little value to your end users.
Contrastingly, focussing on the above definition during any BI implementations and upgrades will ensure that your Business Intelligence systems are widely used and provide massive value to your end users and organisation alike.
Carly Fiorina, who led HP through its merger with Compaq, is reported to have said:
Distilling truth from overwhelming amounts
of information is the essence of leadership.
Whilst that may have been applicable in the beginning of the millennium, these days extracting truth from overwhelming amounts of data can be more accurately, consistently and efficiently performed by modern business intelligence systems. And once you know the truth, you are set free to use it to better manage your business.
Distilling truth from overwhelming amounts
of information is the essence of business intelligence.