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Last week I gave a brief overview of one of the new IBM sets on GuruOnline all about IT Support, this week I’m going to explain a bit of what is covered in the second new IBM set about performance management and business intelligence.

Stephen Brook is from IBM Cognos Innovation Center and he explains in detail how performance management and business intelligence can work for business.

Business intelligence and performance management is really concerned with providing the tools and processes to help you make better business decisions. It tends to be characterize in terms of being able to answer three critical questions, the first is, how is my business performing? Secondly is, why is that so? (Understanding the driver behind your business) and thirdly, being able to say in the light of that, what should I be doing next? Answering the how question is usually done with tools like dashboard, score cards. Understanding why you’re getting the results you are, is something you typically do with reporting and analysis tools, finally understanding what you should be doing next is with planning and forecasting.

Stephen then goes on to explain the differences between business intelligence and performance management.
Business intelligence is sometimes characterised as having an effective corporate memory, it’s about being able to take the data you have in your organisation and turn it into useful information that people can use.
Performance management is an umbrella term that extends that concept, and talks both about understanding that process and the drivers in your business and pulling that information together then using that to make forward decisions like budgeting to forecasting.

In essence you will see improved business performance, and the ability to make better business decisions faster, that’s about being able to identify the key risks facing your business, and understanding how to mitigate them, and also about being able to identify opportunities, and very quickly put action plans in place to capture those opportunities. In practical terms, it’s about avoiding situations where people in your organisation are arguing or debating whose numbers are correct and what data is correct, because they will have the correct single version of the data at their fingertips if you have a performance management system in place.

These are just snippets from three videos, taken from a set of 17 videos. For the rest of Stephens free business advice on performance management and business intelligence, follow the link to GuruOnline to watch them all.

We’ve recently added yet another new contributor to our ever expanding list on GuruOnline, IT Performs Limited is a specialist information technology consulting firm.

IT Performs Ltd was established by like-minded Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse practitioners, who shared both a passion for the huge benefits that BI could bring to organisations, and frustrations about the failures and missed opportunities that they had historically observed – usually when called in to resolve the resulting problems.

In these unique sets, CEO Glen Westlake offers free business advice on business intelligence including how, from a manager point of view, you could benefit from business intelligence, practical approaches to implementing business intelligence, building your data warehouse, data management and data quality and management considerations for business intelligence projects.

So what exactly is business intelligence? Well, in general, business intelligence is taking your data and generating business benefit from it. So what this means is, taking data, turning it into information, creating knowledge, then getting it out to people at the right time in the right place in the right format so they can make better decisions to drive business benefit.

Due to the fact that business intelligence spans many departments and many functional areas of a company, you quite often find it exposes the differences of those parts of the organisation. The data you’re reporting at an operational level is very siloed, so you have a single set of users, a fairly narrow scope of requirements, so for example your finance package will do finance, this means they’re very isolated so they’re actually quite stable in their functionality, their requirements and the data that goes in them. As soon as they’re compared and the data is pulled together you start going across boundaries in your organisation. This usually cause issues of constancy, management issues around communication etc, so there’s a challenge there with having to pull different people together with different parts of the organisation, overcome users with different requirements, users with different skill sets (so you may have users that need information that are at the bottom of the organisation right up to users at the very top of the organisation) will have different skill sets and different views so there’s quite a broad span of enterprise, data, business and users that business intelligence has to cover which can be challenging. This challenge is addressed by only doing short deliveries into each department and have an organisational structure with a business intelligence steering committee and pull the bodies together so when there’s any conflict senior management can resolve it, prioritize and move on.

The above is just a tiny snippet of the information covered by Glen on, you can view all the sets on business intelligence in full on GuruOnline now.