Across the spectrum of competencies within the IT department of a successful organization, Business Intelligence (BI) can have tremendous impact on the revenue cycle, financial outcomes and profitability. Many companies organize their BI departments within the operational management structure instead of IT management because ‘the business’ likes to keep its information close. Organizations that lack success or struggle to have a grasp on the position of their business usually rely on inadequate or non-existent BI information.
Organizations with the largest volumes of data and complexity have the greatest need for organizing data and making it intelligible. Let’s take for example healthcare organizations — many healthcare businesses are shackled by antiquated systems that are exceedingly complex, often surpassing 1,000 tables for a single database. The information can be disorganized and the supporting data infrastructure dysfunctional.
Cognos, a suite of Business Intelligence applications is an excellent BI tool for organizing and analyzing data, particularly for mature businesses i.e. those larger infrastructures which inevitably come with added complexity. The data is stored in a Data Repository (preferably a datamart, or data warehouse) and it is transformed with Cognos, from a shapeless lump of data needing to be sliced and diced, into small bite-size pieces for the Business to chew on.
In order for businesses to make decisions on the fly, data must be presented in aggregate and summed to the highest level, while still having the ability to break it into the most granular details to be sifted through. With millions of transactions and probably the same number of variables, data will not be easy to find. In fact, you will need a sophisticated data-mining tool to extract it. Cognos facilitates this with OLAP summary cubes and drill through detail reports.
In addition to information being accessible and scalable, it also has to be deliverable. This is where businesses can realize the value in deploying Cognos on Sharepoint. Though Cognos is a good tool, the licensing can be very expensive. Some organizations don’t understand that a considerable savings from the Cognos budget can be redirected into the profit line by simply deploying Cognos reports on SharePoint, where the users can access them without a Cognos license and for a much lower cost.
As we continue to explore this link between BI and SharePoint in this four-part blog series, you can discover more ways to scale costs by being efficient in the ways your Business Intelligence information is captured, organized, and deployed.
