Cost-effective Business Intelligence for Today’s Market
Now that the market has once more « crashed », most companies will want to pare their expenditures to stay afloat and ride out the storm. Others may want to seize the opportunity to gain more market share, but at what cost? The most cost effective way would be to make informed decision based on right-time and validated information coming from a Business Intelligence platform.
But what if your company doesn’t have this in place yet? Do you invest in a Business Intelligence platform in a down market knowingly that the total cost of ownership will greatly depend on these factors?
- Hardware cost
- Software cost
- Functionalities and architecture scalability
- Implementation time
- Data manipulation
- Training
- Support and maintenance
Ironically, you should if your budget permits it, but stick with the essentials. You will probably get a great discount for the acquisition of a software and the maintenance package. Any BI software vendor will be eager to gain a new client.
Once you have the tool in hand, you have to get the information out to decision makers quickly. Well, as one informant said to a certain investigative journalist that led to the Watergate scandal: “follow the money!”.
Get most up-to-date information related to money out to decision makers. They probably already have an Excel spreadsheet with the information but that took a week or two to compile. Your goal is to produce that information almost instantly when needed.
In order to get to that point you’ll need to lean some BI concepts to the bare essentials and then revisit them once you’ve stabilized the information output. Another way to be more productive is to create a product backlog that the business people own and create sprints of four weeks each. This is known to some as the Scrum approach.
This approach will essentially help you focus on producing the most valuable information for the business and address any impediments. It will also help avoid going into big project endeavours that are less efficient in producing the right information, consuming a lot of money, time and effort.
Photo by EricGjerde.