More Than Automation

If you've ever been stuck with creating an ROI for a business intelligence project, you know that the number one justification for a BI project is resource savings as a result of automating routing reports. When it comes to getting your project paid for, don't get me wrong, I understand you've gotta do what you've gotta do. But if you limit your project goals to report automation, you'll be cheating your organization out of some important potential gains. Pushing your project team to think beyond automation to a new level of performance can realize much greater gains than "redeploying" a few data analysts.

For example, if you have a $4 billion dollar a year business, I don't mean to be Captain Obvious here, but that's over $10 million dollars a day. If your organization is like many, it probably takes a few days after the end of the month to compile the reports used for decision-making. At the rate of $10 million dollars a day (I just like saying that) even small, incremental improvements in decision-making can have a huge positive impact. If your project is costing you, say, $1 million, instead of just focusing on automation, think about the kind of changes that could pay for your project.

Ask yourself, or your customer, on what Key Performance Indicators am I judged and/or incented? Next, what metrics feed into those KPI's? Finally, what kinds of decisions do we make as a result of those metrics. Now, let's start to break those metrics down a bit. At what time period are they of statistical value? In other words, would you make a decision based on a week's worth of data, or do you really need to accumulate a quarter's worth before you can make a change? This is a critical question to ask of each metric to start to recognize opportunities for improvements on speed-to-market type decisions. This simple question can be the difference between real competitive advantage and mere automation.