Business Intelligence and the Humans who use it
Posted by Dave Kerr on Thu, Mar 17, 2011
A lot of business intelligence innovations focus on making the system bigger and faster.
At SpotOn we take a different approach, and focus on important things like:
- Getting existing business users to actually use their reports, and
- Getting new users excited about using those reports.
Data visualization guru, Stephen Few, touches on this nicely in a
recent blog post.
Following our very popular recent mapping Webinar, the discussions with clients and prospects were interesting. We heard people talking about how to deploy usable reports rather, not just eye candy that runs fast. Old topics like speed and scalability, which have historically (and rightly) fixated on "how fast will the report render" or "how many servers will we need" are trumped by questions like “how fast can we build this map-enabled report?” and “how fast can I get it to my users?”. Thank goodness, it really does seem that more business users are partnering with their IT colleagues to define BI requirements and roadmaps.
Large organizations tend to manage themselves based on geographic divisions, with subgroups, reporting hierarchies, and regional operations. Providing interactive maps integrated within BI reports can dramatically increase user adoption specifically because it presents data exactly how it's most easily consumed. It's one example of truly visual business intelligence.
Maybe you should think about adding maps to your reports. It’s easier than you think.