Panorama Business Intelligence

More and more BI articles and blogs address the importance of powerful exception management capabilities to ensure users don’t get overwhelmed by BI data and make it usable in a powerful way. In this post about how to move from information to intelligence the writer talks about how important and how powerful it is to add process data into BI but makes a comment that the only way to make this effective is by adding powerful exception handling capabilities.
 

                “The detection of changes taking place that affect business – especially those changes that cost the business the most, namely the breakdown of processes due to exceptions – and particularly at an early, pre-critical stage, is just the type of information that becomes ‘timely intelligence.’ Understanding change within the organization requires having a memory of norms, and triggering when thresholds are violated.”

One of the biggest issues in BI today is the inability of information workers to Focus on the Relevant data out of the oceans of data they get exposed to in forms of reports and spreadsheets.

Making the BI tools more intuitive does help a bit, but customer research shows evidence that unless Insights (the important information we use BI tools to find and makes a true difference) gets generated and pushed in a proactive way to information workers,  there won’t be a true massive adoption of BI within enterprise companies.
While exception management tools are not the entire solution, we’ve seen evidence that it makes a significant difference in usability of BI.
In a usage analysis of our BI tools we’ve tried to analyze the impact of our advanced exception management capabilities when it comes to extending the ability to find the relevant data and put it to use.  Our findings are very clear, users using advanced exceptions (as opposed to the basic exceptions that show me color coding of data in a grid) manage to use BI in a significantly more powerful and useful way. These users started by mentioning the fact that they only work with about 1 to10% of the data compared when compared to users that don’t use advanced exceptions. The users also mentioned the powerful impact of seeing ONLY data that behaves exceptionally whereas mundane data is hidden all together to reduce confusion and waste of time. The users also emphasize the importance of having only data that they need to act upon as the biggest differentiator. 
We are currently in the final phases of shipping a new concept that will enable exceptions and business rules to be created without using BI and push the insights to non BI tools.
If you want to read more about Exception management, we’ve written this document you might find interesting
Panorama NovaView – Managing By Exceptions (download)