Panorama Business Intelligence

Very interesting post by Rajan Chandras about how BI impacts competitive advantage.

My first reaction to this post relates to how far most companies are from achieving that ultimate goal of using analytics by all users to make a different and generate a true competitive advantage. While we all read about the trend “du jour” of BI for the masses, the reality is very different.  Most companies have not managed to get analytics to the hands of end users in a way that enables them to interact with the data and generate competitive insights, BI and analytics is still in the hands of analysts and a select number of users. There are many reasons for that but the 2 I feel are the most important are : 1) usability of analytics – which is still not intuitive enough to be as simple as a word processing application, (2) Ability to focus on the relevant. Because of ERP, CRM and other systems, volumes of data are growing exponentially, reports that users get have too much data and makes it very difficult to “Focus on the relevant”.

My second reaction relates to the value of innovation in analytics. I actually think that the commoditization of BI is bringing companies closer to one another and (at the price of being accused of being biased) innovation can make a real competitive difference:Think about it this way, if similar customers can now better understand the trends of specific products by geography or seasonality that means closing the gap from a competitive standpoint. While the data is owned by each company separately, it is very likely that the insights generated will be similar just because these 2 competing companies have similar products and see similar trends….   
Just a little bit of advertizing from our side…

A couple of years ago we’ve made a decision to help end users “focus on the relevant” as a way to improve the usability and real impact of analytics. We decided to focus on making sure an end users can take a large report and apply simple business rules (like Outlook email rules) that help you do some smart filtering that bring data closer to what the end user cares about. That is part of our Proactive BI initiative. Another thing is making sure end users don’t have to constantly use BI tools to find interesting insights. NovaView SpotLight is exactly that.

The other area of focus for us is to ensure we do give competitive advantage through innovation. One example relates to the ability to act faster on insights… As I mentioned in previous posts, BI is synonymous with action but no BI solution provides an integrated approach of actually taking action in a structured way. Panorama has been focused on delivering out of the box integration with workflow and process management applications in a smart way that enables a user to “right click” on a metric and see a set of proposed actions he can take.

Speeding up the action can make the entire difference in a competitive situation.

If 2 competitive companies reach the same conclusion through a “BI insight” it’s the one that will act faster that will get the advantage.