by Steve Williams, Nancy Williams
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Product Description
Business Intelligence (BI): It's not just a technology. It's not just a methodology. It's a powerful new management approach that - when done right - can deliver knowledge, efficiency, better decisions, and profit to almost any organization that uses it.
When BI first came on the scene, it promised a lot but often failed to deliver. The missing element was the business-centric focus explained in The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence. Written by BI gurus Steve Williams and Nancy Williams, The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence shows step by step how you can achieve the promise of BI by connecting it to your organization's strategic goals, culture, and strengths while correcting your BI weaknesses.
Features:
* Provides a practical, process-oriented guide to achieve the full promise of BI.
* Shows how world-class companies used BI to become leaders in their industries.
* Helps senior business and IT executives understand the strategic impact of BI and how they can ensure a strong payoff from their BI investments.
* Identifies the most common mistakes organizations make in implementing BI.
* Includes a helpful glossary of BI terms.
* Includes a BI readiness assessment for your organization.
* Includes Web links and extensive references for more information.
Steve Williams, President and founder of DecisionPath Consulting, is a leading advocate of business-driven BI design and development. His consulting firm is one of the largest in the specialized field of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. Steve has over 23 years experience in information systems and systems engineering and has co-authored a training course on the BI Pathway Method. Nancy Williams is Vice President of DecisionPath Consulting. With over 21 years of business and technical experience, she provides technical and strategic leadership on business intelligence as well as hands-on guidance for client engagements.
* A practical, process-oriented book that will help organizations realize the promise of BI
* Written by Nancy and Steve Williams, veteran consultants and instructors with hands-on, "in the trenches" experience in government and corporate business intelligence applications
* Will help senior business and IT executives understand the strategic impact of BI and how they
can help ensure a strong payoff on BI investments
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Make a difference to your bottom line with BI, 2008-12-04
In the first two chapters the authors develop their core argument. BI projects are only successful when they have a positive impact on the bottom line of an organisation. BI so the central and simple theme of the authors, needs to give an organisation competitive advantage by either increasing its profits or decreasing its costs.
They continue to say that BI must not be implemented in an unstructured manner, but has to be at the core of the business and its processes. Therefore, it needs to be aligned with the overall business strategy. One of the fundamental mistakes an organisation can make is to take an ad hoc appraoch to BI.
Indeed it is my own experience that the full potential of BI is only unlocked by few organisations. Often BI is just used to produce a report here and there but is not embedded in the core business processes: Reporting is disjointed, without an overall strategy, and most of the time report results are not followed up by action..
This stands in contrast to an organisation that uses BI strategically, e.g. to identify valuable customers that are given preferential treatment or special conditions, as opposed to less profitable customers.
BI opportunity analysis according to the authors, stands at the beginning of each BI project. It requires intimate knowledge of the industry that the organisation operates in (competitors, industry trends etc.), an in depth understanding of the organisation's business processes and business drivers, and a thorough understanding of how to align BI and Data Mining techniques with the BI objectives. "For any given company in any given industry, we should systematically evaluate its industry, strategy, and business design as a means of identifying potential BI opportunities". Unfortunately, a rare combination of skills.
In the chapters that follow (chapters 3 to 6), the authors continue to develop their iterative, full lifecycle methodology, the BI Pathway method. It is split into three phases. The architecture phase includes the development of the BI portfolio, the BI readiness assessment, and business re-engineering models (How is information currently used and how will it be used in the future? How will BI influence and transform business processes?). The implementation phase more or less follows traditional, more technically focused implementation methods (Kimball , Inmon etc.). During the operational phase the implementation is fine tuned and continuously improved.
In chapter 7 the authors give very useful practical examples of how BI can be aligned with business processes. This is a good starting point for getting ideas of how to embed BI in the everyday business processes of an organisation.
Chapter 8 offers a good overview on the mistakes that are typically made in a BI project.
In my opinion this is one of the few books that actually offers fresh insights. Coming mainly from a technical background, this book was an eye opener for me. Even though it was always clear to me that BI projects need to be driven by business processes, I have to admit that I did not understand the full extent of this until I had read this book. What I also liked were the numerous case studies and practical examples that are given, which is so often lacking in other BI books. The only criticism I have is that more of this hands on stuff would have been even better. What I also found quite useful is the executive summary at the end of each chapter. All in all a highly recommended book for both the technical and business BI practitioner, the novice and the expert.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Points from everywhere to everyone, 2008-09-20
Let me start by saying that I liked this book.
At the beginning, it appears like a copy of a specific book that has been a best-seller of this genre (unfortunately, I read that book; Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning). But little after going through the chapters - and passing my little disappointment - the reader finds that it is basically a summary of - maybe - all the major and must-read books of the genre in one place. Starting from strategic view and management (Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage) to technical points (DWH lifecycle) to even famous articles and references to websites and online standards.
The authors clearly read (and most probably applied what in) each of these books and then said "why not put everything together in one place so everything will be understood". But while doing so, they actually pieced it together and produced a solid, actionable work, which is of their own.
To me, it was like a crash course in every area of BI with stressing on management and business value. Process Engineering & Opportunity Assessment are my favorite chapters in this book. And although all books nowadays provide you with a framework here or there, I find this one's rather interesting.
It is a nice read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A valuable contribution to the different perspectives that surround business intelligence, 2008-08-28
The world of business intelligence (BI) has been dominated by a technicians approach. There are architectures, data models, algorithms, and transformations. Now there is a book about the "soft side of business intelligence" from the perspective of the businessperson.
The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence by Nancy Williams and Steve Williams covers a wide variety of topics, all relevant and informative. There are several highlights to the book:
* A checklist of common mistakes to avoid when building the business intelligence infrastructure,
* What to look for in the building of the business intelligence infrastructure,
* Plenty of "mini" case studies, and so forth.
In addition, there is a brief section on the early dawn of information systems, beginning with simple cost accounting and going to the balanced scorecard. Another interesting feature is the discussion of the maturity model of business intelligence.
Another nice feature of the book is the sprinkling throughout of pithy words and contributions from notables such as Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Gordon Moore and others.
The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence is an easy read that is full of good information. This book belongs on the desk of the business manager charged with building and operating the business intelligence infrastructure. This book represents a valuable contribution to the different perspectives that surround business intelligence.
Review Submitted by Bill Inmon
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Profit Impact of Business Intelligence, 2008-05-07
Very celar and concise. This was of great value in my efforts to articulate the value of Business Intelligence within our organization.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Required Reading for the BI Professional, 2007-08-28
Steve and Nancy Williams have made a significant contribution to the Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence literature with this comprehensive and well organized argument for looking at Business Intelligence as an investment in building sustainable organizational value in either a for-profit or non-profit environment. The book provides a clear understanding of the need for Business Intelligence along with the challenges that have plagued many efforts in the past. In it they put forth a number of ideas to address these challenges while outlining a "value management" oriented methodology for overcoming them. In the process they point out that many of the TDWI Best Practices are completely consistent with the value oriented approach.
The husband-wife team skillfully make the case that a successful Business Intelligence program needs to focus on building measurable and sustainable business value through coordinated change in workflow (business process), information flow (dashboards, scorecards, "reports", etc.), and decision structure. And that a Business Intelligence Program needs to be considered and managed as a "portfolio" consisting of multiple individual Business Intelligence projects, each characterized by both benefit and risk.
They argue that for a BI (Business Intelligence) project to add value it needs to enhance the organization's ability to deliver greater value to its customers. Each BI project delivers some benefit, and always at some risk. Both the benefit and the risk need to be measured and managed. The existence of multiple projects gives rise to the need to manage a "portfolio" of BI projects with varying degrees of risk and reward.
They point out that BI delivers information and that information is only beneficial if the information is useful to decision-makers. That is, it reduces the uncertainty surrounding a decision. Since the only thing information can do is alter a decision, one's need for information becomes a function of the decision and the business process to which it belongs. Thus new information often presents an opportunity to make a decision more efficiently bringing about a change in the way a decision is made (the decision structure). Furthermore, data used as input to one business process often originates in another. Hence, the need to consider possible changes in more than one business process in order to achieve the expected benefit from improved decision-making capability. Many of the challenges that have led to undesirable results in the past can be traced to the inability of the organization to deal effectively with this inter-related and often required simultaneous change in decision structure and work process. This inability is most likely attributable to focusing on specific technical objectives rather than the more encompassing value-building objectives of the investment. A value-focused approach helps anticipate this impact and resolve possible conflict.
This is one book that should be within easy reach of every BI professional, team-lead, business analyst, supervisor, manager, and CIO interested in building a value oriented organization.
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