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3 So what are metrics / KPIs anyways? How do I get started?
To verify the design of the initial system, we could ask the following questions of every strategic initiative:
Goal Alignment queries:
- What is the strategic goal of the organization that is being addressed by this particular activity?
- What organizational mission/vision does it relate to?
- Do we have a hypothesis as to how this initiative will eventually improve results / performance (i.e. a strategy map)?
Baseline queries:
- What is the existing level of performance? Do we know or have the capability to know (monitoring capability)?
- Are we collecting this data and storing it somewhere?
- What are the statistical parameters of this data, e.g. how much random variation does it contain? Are we measuring this?
Cost and risk queries:
- What is the existing cost of present operations?
- How much will that increase when we go ahead with the initiative?
- What is the risk that this cost will be exceeded or achieved? Have we performed a similar sensitivity analysit on this?
- Is the money being spent on this presebt initiative the best use of the funds, or is there a better alternative usage?
- What is the risk that the initiative will fail? Has this assessment been included in the planning?
Customer and Stakeholder queries:
- Have you listed all the communities of interest that have a stake in this present initiative?
- Who are the kinds of customers/stakeholders who will benefit directly from this initiative? Who will benefit indirectly? What are the quantitative / qualitative benefits?
- Is the specified initiative the best way to increase satisfaction for all kinds of customers, or is there a better way?
- How will we know that the initiative benefits these customers?
Metrics related queries:
- What metrics will be used to define the benefit?
- Are these the best metrics? How do we know that?
- How many metrics need to be tracked? If this is a large number (it usually is), what kind of system are you planning to use to track them?
- Are the metrics standardized, so they can be benchmarked against performance in other organizations? What are the industry standard metrics available?
Measurement Methodology related queries:
- How will the metrics be measured? What methods will be used, and how frequently will data be collected? Are there any industry standards for this?
- Is this the best way to do the measurements? How do we know that?
Results related queries:
- How can we demonstrate that this strategic initiative, and not something else, contributed to a change in results?
- How much of the change was probably random?
4 Tools for business intelligence
People doing business intelligence have developed tools that ease the work, especially when the intelligence task involves gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. These are some tools commonly used for business intelligence:
- OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) sometimes simply called Analytics (based on dimensional analysis and the hypercube or 'cube')
- Scorecarding, dashboarding and data bvisualization
- Data Modelling and tools for defining Business Logic Layer s and Business Rules
- Report Server s
- Data warehouses
- Data miningData mining also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD is the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns. To do this, data mining uses computational techniques from Statistics and Pattern recognition. Data mining has be
- Business workflow analysis
- Business performance management
- Business management systems p2p
- Document warehouseA document warehouse tells you why things have happened, instead of what has happened as in data warehousing. To get more support in the decision making process one can link the document warehouse and the data warehouse together to get a powerful combinats
- Text miningText mining also known as intelligent text analysis text data mining or knowledge-discovery in text KDT , refers generally to the process of extracting interesting and non-trivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text mining is a young in
Companies providing BI software / Project implementation
- Appian Corporation
- Business ObjectsBusiness Objects is a company that creates and markets business intelligence applications analyzing internal and external data. The company seeks to help clients improve efficiency; align company strategies; strengthen profitable relationships; and enhanc
- Business-Soft
- CapgeminiThe Capgemini Group is one of the world's largest information technology services and management consulting companies with over 55,000 staff worldwide. It is headquartered in Paris, France and was founded in 1967 by Serge Kampf, who is the chairman. In Ma
- Cartesis
- CognosCognos is an Ottawa, Ontario based company which makes business intelligence (BI) and performance planning software. It was founded in 1969 and employs 3,000 people. Cognos were previously called Quasar. Cognos product called Metrics Manager won the.
- Collective Intelligence
- Comshare
- Hyperion Solutions now owns Brio software
- Inforay
- Inforte
- MicroStrategy
- Oberon-bwa
- SAS Institute
- Saksoft
- OutlookSoft
