There is certainly a “cool factor” introduced when business intelligence is enabled to create charts and graphs and alerts. But do executives really use this information to make decisions? I think “yes”!
A few years ago during the economic downturn I worked with an organization that did not have visibility to current revenue volumes and the key metrics associated with revenue from various operational processes. These volumes authenticated significant near term decision making for the organization. There was no centralized approach to Business Intelligence in this organization so our challenge seemed overwhelming. We needed to quickly deploy automated processes to solve this dilemma. Using flexible BI tools and a talented relentless staff, we assimilated key financial and clinical / operational metrics that provided up to date information to executives to allow them to make near real-time decisions to drive the business. We also made a lasting impact to data governance practices and use of these tools became integrated into key IT governance program funding and quality improvement processes over time.
What were the keys to success?
- Managing the cultural change associated with building and implementing a data governance strategy over a long period of time: To tackle this we engaged the executive team to determine the key indicators that drive the business. We also engaged key C-level executive leadership to ensure we were asking the right questions about the data (in the context of the dashboards) to reinforce use of the dashboards for key decisions such as staffing or program creation.
- Forming an executive level data governance steering team to enforce and communicate decisions about data sources and data definitions for uniformity across the organization: This change also lead to discussions about data sources and terminology use for new enterprise applications implemented within the organization. This team performed as a sub-component of the overall IS Governance process.
- Convincing the organization to implement one enterprise BI environment to enable easy access, transparency and reuse of this information: This involved sun setting of multiple legacy BI platforms and a move to Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition platform which was the technology of choice for this organization.
- We also employed an aggressive communication strategy to ensure a common message from domain leaders related to the dashboards and associated data governance foundation.
Structured BI provided a foundation for decision making unlike the organization had experienced to date. In addition to structured BI and data warehouses, I am very excited about use of Endeca in the healthcare setting as it allows interacting with data in a conversational manner and enables exploring of both unstructured and structured new data sources quick and easy. This capability coupled with the keys to success mentioned above will enable powerful visualization and interaction with data to answer questions that we haven’t thought to ask yet. “Conversations with our data” will revolutionize our approach to Business Intelligence!
Learn about Perficient and Oracle solutions for Population Health Management in our upcoming webinar ” ACO = HIE + Analytics: Enabling Population Health Management on Feb 21st. https://cc.readytalk.com/r/3aa5iggu2gyg
