Business Intelligence systems can track, interrogate and analyse data in all three time periods:
- PAST: Historic data that provides an indication from where you have come. It is static and whilst it can be used for analysis, trending, benchmarking etc, it has a small impact on your organisation’s current performance. For the sake of comparison, we assume that it carries a relative influence of 1 and a relative cost of 1.
- PRESENT: This is more powerful data as it allows end users to make real time adjustments to organisational processes and strategies to boost current performance. It carries a relative influence of 3 and a relative cost of 2. Ie. real-time data has 3 to 4 times the impact of historic data on company performance but costs twice as much to capture/track.
- FUTURE: Accurate future predictions are the ultimate goal in BI as it allows users to prepare and position their organisation to take advantage of events immediately as they occur. Predicting the future carries an element of risk, however if done correctly, the benefits are enormous. The relative influence of future predictions depends on the data itself however values of 10 to 100 are not uncommon. The cost factor typically ranges between 5 to 8 times that of historic data, however there is no upper limit to what some organisations will spend to accurately predict the future.
| Relative Cost | Relative Impact | Data Accuracy | |
| Past (Historic data) | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Present (Real Time data) | 2 | 3 to 4 | 98% – 100% |
| Future (Predictive data) | 5 to 8+ | 10 to 100+ | -inf to +inf |
| Note: the relative costs as detailed above were generated from a review of our company’s historic development costs. The relative impact comes from the value our clients attributed to their reports. | |||