Have the general improvements in computer technology made BI more readily adoptable?
Possibly, possibly not. It’s more how do you work out the value you’e really going to get out of it. You do find a lot of BI was shelfware or partial shelfware, meaning it already got installed but people didn’t use it. We’d just give someone a query tool and a data warehouse and say a prayer. It probably wasn’t enough. [We figured] we’d give them query tools and warehouses, and somehow life would be better. The next big thing is how to give people insight. Say the cost of a product line spiked; you know that nugget of insight. Then you need to figure out why it happened — is it an error, a trend? Instead of the approach [of], “Here’s a query tool, hope you find something impactful,” we’e figuring out how to get actionable information into everyone’s hands. Business performance management is built on BI, but it goes beyond that; it’s also thinking about operational and planning capabilities. You need to develop plans: How do you know whether information is good or bad? Whose gut feeli
