Could business intelligence (BI) solve some of your most common data issues and enable improved decision making?
It's a nice idea, but isn’t business intelligence complicated?
In truth, BI is not hugely complex, it’s simply a matter of delivering timely intelligence to business users, enabling them to make better, more informed decisions in order to meet or exceed pre-defined goals or targets.
So Why Do So Many Financial Institutions Find BI So Complicated?
Often they haven’t achieved a consensus across all departments that BI is actually required.
Traditional banking business intelligence requires cooperation across departments, and without this cooperation, it is difficult to turn data into a useful decision making asset.
Without cooperation, there are conscious and/or subconscious human obstacles and technological obstacles between the core source systems in which the data resides and the business users, who should be receiving that data in an intelligent format that they can understand.
How Do You Know if this is Happening in Your Financial Institution?
If you feel any of the following statements apply to your organisation, it may be time to consider investing in better banking business intelligence:
- We have a vault of valuable data in our core banking system, but we can’t access it.
- It takes way too long to produce results; by the time the data arrives, we’ve missed an opportunity to act.
- There is too much information – we just need to see what is important.
- We have two people presenting the same performance metric but receiving two different results, and we don't understand why.
- We need to base our decisions on accurate information, not just a hunch.
- We spend too long debating whether the numbers are correct and don’t really know if we're making good decisions.
- Our results enable us to see what has happened but we don’t really know why it’s happened – we can’t drill down into the results to investigate further.
- Our reports are too static, and we can’t slice and dice the data when we need to perform analysis.
- Our Excel reporting is getting too complicated, and maintaining it has become increasingly time-consuming.
- We’ve spent a lot of time and money on a data warehouse but still don’t have the results we were promised at the outset.
If you feel it is time for your business to move to a robust BI solution but don’t know where to start, then read our recent post: 5 ways to ensure banking BI success.
