 | Level: Introductory S. E Slack (sally@sslack.com), Author and business transformation consultant, Freelance writer
01 Apr 2008 If you’re not using business intelligence in your information architecture,
you’re missing a key opportunity to help your organization stay ahead of the
competition. Take steps to help your executives with decision making, strategic
planning, and tactical responses to evolving business markets.
This series explores a variety of elements that create a successful information
architecture design. As you manage and organize data and content, work with
distributed data mining, and analyze and present information to users, there is a
key element that you can’t let go untapped: business intelligence. How are you
using all that data to build a better business from within? Are you getting the
right information to the right people and in a format they can understand? If your
first response is, “Um, uh…,” then it’s a good bet that your design is suffering
from what some experts call an information paradox
—an excess of
information that has little usefulness.
While it’s true that business intelligence is almost inherent in a successful
information architecture design, that concept primarily refers to the external
user of the architecture. Your design must deliver relevant and targeted
information to the user, of course, which requires plenty of data filtering and a
savvy look at individual users. That’s one aspect of business intelligence.
I'm not talking about that aspect of business intelligence here, however. I'm
talking about delivering relevant and targeted information to people within your
organization. What are those individual users buying? What are they looking at but
not buying? Which areas of the site are they visiting before they make a purchase?
How many users are viewing the site and leaving without ever dropping a dime on
your organization’s products? If you put this kind of information into the hands
of the right internal people at the right time, they have a tactical business
advantage. If you don't, your entire organization could suffer. It’s a lot to
think about, but in the following sections I’ll give you a few ideas that should
help you use business intelligence to your organization’s advantage.
Skills and competencies
When using business intelligence as an internal business tool in your information
architecture design, you wear many different hats:
- You must clearly understand your organization’s business goals.
- You must be a sharp evaluator of information.
- You must be able to extract the precise information that is of use to
executives.
- Your information technology (IT) reflexes must be quick enough to transform
elements of your design based on the information you retrieve.
Of course you need the basic IT skills of data design and architecture, database
administration, Structured Query Language (SQL) scripting, data repository
mapping, and business domain knowledge. But from a pure business perspective,
assessment, research, and business transformation skills are the primary skills
and competencies that you need to apply business intelligence effectively in your
design.
Assess your data’s ease
of access
It doesn’t matter whether you use a data warehouse, a cube data structure, or a
data mart in your information architecture. What matters more is whether you set
up the design so that your business executives can access the information quickly
and easily. As you put together your design, keep in mind that typical executives
don’t really get IT-speak. They might act like they do, but in reality,
they just want the bottom-line details and don’t care how the details arrive. It’s
sort of like how most people use a refrigerator—they don’t want to know
about the coolants in the system; they just want the food to be cold when they
reach for it.
Take a good, hard look at your design. How easy is it for anyone outside the IT
department to find and understand information? Do people have to ask for special
reports just to find out how many visitors were on the site the day before? Do
they have to wait for the information, or is it instantly available? Think like an
executive here. For example, if you know a competitor just released a product in
direct competition to your top-selling product, don’t you want to instantly know
whether visits to that portion of your Web site dropped in response? You don’t
want to make a special request to the IT department to run a report that will
appear in a day or two, that’s for sure. You want the information immediately so
you can counterattack with a sudden sale or other strategy.
You’ll score big points if you can produce business-relevant information at the
drop of a hat. However, it’s tough to produce that information if you don’t really
understand what is needed by the business. Resist the urge to be the IT ostrich,
and step outside your department to get the direction you need.
Research within your
organization
To get that direction, you need to sit down with your executives to determine the
kind of information they want. I know that’s not an easy task. Executives—
especially top-level executives—have a tendency to assume that you can
read minds, as if that’s part of your job description. They think you can just
recognize key business patterns and relationships in your design without any help
from them. You could, of course, but it won’t mean that you’re recognizing the
types of patterns and relationships that are most useful to them.
Instead of trying to read minds and hitting a brick wall, you may have to take
charge and risk running afoul of the suits. After all, if you’re going to get in
trouble for not providing them with the right kind of data, why not just get in
trouble up front for bothering them? There are a couple different ways you can
attack this brick wall. You can take it apart slowly by begging to be included in
business meetings throughout the organization. That’s certainly one method, and it
does work. It’s pretty painful, however, because it requires that you sit in on a
lot of meetings that are long, boring, and sometimes even self-indulgent on the
part of the meeting leader. In the end, you might or might not get the guidance
you need.
A second approach is to simply ram into the brick wall by getting on key
executive calendars for a 15 to 30 minute meeting once a month. Before you go in,
be sure you understand the overall goals of the business. You should be able to
get this information from your manager, internal business publications such as
monthly magazines or the annual report, or, heck, even the “About us” section of
the Web site. For example, most organizations set annual goals such as “increase
sales by 10 percent” or something along those lines.
In the meeting, ask the following types of questions (but certainly don’t limit
yourself to these if you have others):
- What kind of information from consumers is most helpful to you?
- How often do you want this information?
- What’s your ideal turnaround time when you need information?
- What format is easiest for you to use?
- What new business goals are coming up that I can help you obtain information
for?
Do you see how the conversation doesn’t seem to involve IT at all? You’re not
asking the executives which database they want to use. You’re asking them for
business input. It’s critical that you think in these terms when you’re thinking
of business intelligence. Too many IT teams can’t take off their technical hats
long enough to make sense to business executives who don’t care how the
information is located, just that it is. Resist the urge to show off your
technical skills. Just talk in general business terms and then listen to the
responses you’re getting. Your executives will be more than happy to tell you what
they want if you give them the opportunity.
Dig deep, but be nimble
The management of business information is becoming much more complex. Business
intelligence is not just a means of analyzing and reporting information after the
fact. It should be a means of transforming the business on the go to respond to
competitive issues and consumer needs. The basic idea is to leverage information
to better plan, measure, and manage the business. If you take this approach,
you’ll know where and how value is created in the business, and you’ll be able to
respond much more quickly to your organization’s changing business environment.
As a result, you need to take a close look at how nimble your design is. Don’t
kid yourself with this one. If your executives come to you and say that a new
sales approach is needed within a week, can you deliver the required changes in
the design? For example, if a competitive issue means your organization needs to
suddenly add a 30 percent discount to an item, track how many of those items are
sold in the first 24 hours of the promotion, and monitor how many users view the
promotion but leave without a purchase—can your design do all that?
A highly intuitive information architecture design can. A less stellar design
requires hours of coding, redesign, and testing first. Your design must be able to
dig deep enough to provide everything your organization needs at this moment but
be nimble enough to change course within hours. A tall order? Yes. Impossible? No.
There are plenty of products available to help you with a variety of tasks you
might need to accomplish, and they don’t have to be expensive. One such product is
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), an open source
relational-reporting solution. See the Resources section
to learn more about BIRT.
Tools and techniques
This section provides tools and techniques to consider as you apply business
intelligence to your information architecture design.
Explore IBM InfoSphere
Warehouse
IBM recently introduced InfoSphere™ Warehouse with Optim Data Retention,
a single business intelligence solution that can help improve business insights by
querying just the information relevant to your business and archiving the rest.
The key to this product is that it helps you manage growing amounts of information
by combining data warehousing and archiving capabilities in one product.
Measure business success
Any business intelligence solution that you use should provide strong analytic
capabilities. By strong, I mean they must be able to extract actionable
information from both structured data, such as databases and Web pages, and
unstructured data, such as text, audio, and video. Ideally, the solution should be
one that runs automatically with little work on your part.
IBM offers several analytics solutions that use DB2® as a base. For
example, IBM Data Warehousing Balanced Configuration Unit for AIX® operating
system uses DB2 Universal Database Data Warehouse Edition as a key component. The
product offers a variety of built-in analytics that can be used in most
industries. For more information on DB2, check out the link in the
Resources section.
Milestones
There are several milestones to consider from a business intelligence
perspective. Keep these in mind as you work on your design:
- Identify the business questions your executives have.
- When you know the questions, determine which design best measures and reports
the information required.
- Take an inventory of the existing business data sources at your disposal. Will
any of those meet the requirements?
- Create a plan for integrating the business information into a format that’s
understandable and easily accessible to executives.
When you’re working on your milestones, keep in mind that the organization as a
whole is the beneficiary of your business intelligence efforts. While departments
such as sales might be the most obvious beneficiaries of business intelligence
information, don’t overlook departments such as manufacturing, shipping, human
resources, and so on. What can these departments glean from the information your
design uncovers? Stay flexible and open-minded. You’ll likely discover that almost
every area of your organization can benefit from your talents.
Summary
While there is certainly much to know about business intelligence, I hope this
discussion has prompted you to look at the concept from a more business-centric
viewpoint than an IT viewpoint. Tune in to this series to learn about distributed
data mining next month.
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About the author | 
| | Slack is a Studio B writer and author of many books, including the recently
released Windows Vista Home Entertainment with Windows Media Center and Xbox
360. She has been an executive and business transformation consultant for
IBM, State Farm, and Lenovo International. |
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