In a recent discussion with a client I was asked how come we knew, as a Business Intelligence company, so much about business process and operational systems. My reply is a sincere view that I have held for some time – developing good Business Intelligence means implementing Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) to enable the organisation to be more responsive to its stakeholders.
If you develop a business intelligence system that truly helps the business then several things are going to happen
Firstly during the development phase your analysis of existing business processes and their data sources is going to highlight strengths and weaknesses. It will show where there is duplication or inconsistency in the business process. It will also highlight missing data and data quality issues. As part of your development you need a way in which these discoveries can be fed back to management and process owners to get fixed – but don’t try to fix them as part of your project otherwise you will have a never-ending scope! Therefore the development of a Business Intelligence solution will often act as a driver for many small pieces of Business Processing Re-engineering.
Secondly once you have implemented your successful Business Intelligence system you will start using it to understand your business, be that your customers, supply chain or any other part of your organisation. And if you make use of your insight then you will look to change the way in which you work to improve what you are doing. This improvement is necessarily a larger piece of Business Process Re-Engineering. And once you have made those changes you are going to have to re-engineer your Business Intelligence solution to take into account the new business paradigm
Delivering a successful Business Intelligence system is really just an information led/based way of approaching business process re-engineering
