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"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time."
The words of Sir Winston Churchill might 'strike a chord with all those trying to introduce "information democracy" into the modem enterprise.
How much simpler it would be to have "information monarchy" -- keeping it in one small group's hands -- or "information communism" -- where everyone shares the same information, but at such a debased level that it ceases to be any use.
Neither is a real option for the modern organisation, however. Each has a large,, maybe enormous, store of data that can give valuable insights to users across the organisation, helping them and their company address problems more quickly and exploit opportunities better.
If all workers can do this to carry out their respective roles, and when information is uniform and consistent across the enterprise, true "information democracy" could be said to have been achieved.
That is the theory, at least. The technology that is meant to help companies get there is business intelligence (BI) software, and judging by the pitfalls that many organisations fall into when implementing it, theory and practice are a long way adrift.
"If you ask organisations what they want to use BI for, better decision-making is the top answer," says Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president at Gartner, the IT analysts. "But most organisations are not making better decisions now than they did five years ago."
At Gartner's recent BI summit in London, it revealed the five "fatal flaws" for companies implementing BI. The biggest one? Thinking there are only five (the research company identifies seven).
There is no doubting the interest in BI -- the London event drew 750 attendees and there was a similar shindig in Chicago earlier this month. That is partly because, more than ever, enterprises need BI to be successful now.
Mountains of data, growing at 30-50 per cent a year for many enterprises, the increasing burden of government regulation and compliance obligations, competition and customer demands are focusing attention on the need for timely -- and often realtime -- information, and in plenty of detail.
It is not that enterprises have ignored BI over the past decade one of the problems looks to have been haphazard and chaotic overinvestment. The record number of competing or overlapping BI tools that Gartner has found in one organisation is 23.
There has also been a widespread failure to realise that any system drawing on a reservoir of data needs some guarantee about the purity of the resource. "There have been a lot of difficulties behind the scenes," says Kevin Strange, another Gartner expert. "There is a need to allocate resources to look at data quality, and comb through the data to get the right information coming into the data warehouse."
Customers have further reservations: "BI is often presented as a solution that gives you one version of the truth," says Gabriel Fuchs, chief analytic officer at La Suisse, the Swiss insurance group, and a long-time user and implementer of BI. "But what you get is BI islands, and a lot of different systems that can't communicate with each other. It often works very well at departmental level, but it rarely works at the corporate level."
Fuchs adds that the tools are very good, but too complex for all but 15-20 per cent of users. These "power users" can take advantage of the tools' sophisticated analysis and data mining features, but the rest will simply use it as a reporting engine. The result is a great deal of "shelfware," unused or underused software, sitting around in enterprises.
A further problem, he says, is that there are no really easy-to-use models for working out the return on investment for a BI application. In their absence, he says, a key indicator is to see how many people are using it: "If you have 100 licences and only 25 people are using it, it is just not going to work."
Some things are changing for the better, however. Buytendijk and colleague Howard Dresner say it is promising that many large organisations are standardising on a smaller set of tools, deployed to a larger group of people. 'It has been such a mess that people need to clean up," says Buytendijk.
The pressure of regulations such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act and, in financial services, the Basel 2 capital adequacy rules, has encouraged companies to "fix up" their practices, he says, even if they are still using BI tactically rather than in a strategic way across the organisation.
Improvements in the technology, along with increased computer processing power, are also helping companies at the sharp end of the regulators' recent muscle-flexing. For these companies the need for speed and detail -- or granularity in IT jargon -- is becoming paramount.
"We are going through a BI journey at the moment," a business systems executive at one big European bank told the Gartner summit. "We want to ensure we can join financial and business numbers together." The executive spoke of pressure to "drill back" into detail from relatively high-level, summarised reports, with the intervals between updates coming down from four hours to 15-25 minutes.
This real-time, or near realtime, monitoring of business activity -- which is akin to pointing a telescope back into the business -- is being used by very few companies yet, apart from call centres, says Elaine Fletcher, practice manager for BI at LogicaCMG. Banking is one sector that is leading the field, she says, and activity focuses on "rearview mirror" analysis designed to monitor and understand patterns.
More automotive vocabulary is being borrowed by the BI sector for another key trend -- the "corporate dashboard," a kind of portal for presenting key performance indicators to executives that appears to generate more enthusiasm among business users than independent experts. Buytendijk says the concept recalls the "executive information systems" of the 1980s, with the same mistakes made again -- notably, if the dashboard is simply applied on top of poor quality, poorly integrated data. "It's right at the top of the hype cycle," adds Dresner. "Why do executives want dashboards? Because their friends have one."
But Fuchs at La Suisse says that, providing the data are reliable, dashboards can give a "nice overview that is simple, standardised and easy to understand." They are also easier to maintain than the old executive information systems, he says.
The investment in modern dashboards needs not be huge, and the savings can be large. An adviser at one big European oil producer told the Gartner summit that it had invested less than $1m in dashboards for tasks such as controlling and improving maintenance, and is saving more than $7m a year.
In contrast CPM, or corporate performance management, seems to find favour more with analysts -- especially Gartner, which coined the concept in 2000 -- than with users. This is not a replacement for BI but encompasses both it and budgeting and planning tools too, so that enterprises have, in the words of Butler Group, another IT research company, "one eye on the past and another on the future,".
That is one interpretation, at least, of CPM, and a Gartner survey of BI spending plans, released at the Chicago event, suggested this will be a priority for many businesses.
But for Fuchs it is an acronym too far. "CPM is very much a repackaging of BI," he says. "It tries to automate BI activities by defining and implementing the processes behind them. It's just too big and messy and like BI, it's going to work on a departmental rather than corporate level. How can you efficiently compare performance between different departments that work with different and individual key indicators? Add to this the political aspects within an organisation, and you understand why there is more talk than action."
As for the onward march of "information democracy" within companies, the balance between simplicity and sophistication will remain vital. Gartner says interfaces need to become simpler to satisfy the demands of a large community of casual users, but should be sophisticated enough to deliver value and insight.
Ever ready with a new term, it looks forward to an era of "information magnetism," where useful insights "find" users based on their roles and preferences. This will be a good thing, it says, as more casual users will benefit from BI, improving administrator-to-user ratios.
In most democracies, however, there is no obligation on individuals to use all the sources of information available. Fuchs believes the majority of enterprise workers will be happy to access standardised BI reports, leaving the "power users" to do the sophisticated analysis and then distribute the results to people who might need it.
Unless their boss tells them to do otherwise, of course. Who said enterprises were ever democratic?
Further feature articles on B1, and interviews with two leading vendors, appear on Page 2.
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