In spite of dramatic advances in technology and tools that aid in the decision-making process, however, far too many people still make decisions the old-fashioned way: by blending titbits of current information, best recollections of the past, advice from others, a whole lot of “gut instinct” and then assessing which path is likely to give the best possible outcome for the decision at hand.

Making decisions as described in the introduction of this article is not the result of a lack of information, but because of a lack of relevant information. The – often piles of - information and detailed reports at hand do not help the decision maker (enough) because many people in, alas, a great number of organizations have no clue as to what outcomes are in effect desired and how these are to be prioritized. They miss focus on and alignment of the organizational strategy in the existing reports.

Gartner’s research as it was presented at the latest BI Summit in Amsterdam, concluded after interviewing 1.500 CIO’s that Business Intelligence (BI) – once again – is the top priority of most CIO’s. Yet Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer said that BI in most of the cases still remains a case of small successes in making operational reports, while technology could enable organizations in achieving major performance improvements. The key according to Bitterer is to be found in connecting BI to the organizational strategy. According to Bitterer performance management is essential for further success.

“The goal of performance management is to link operational activities with business strategy. Defining the ‘metrics’ to use is key, because, if well chosen, these are the appropriate measures of the success, or otherwise, of strategic objectives. The challenge many organizations face is in determining which metrics are the most important to use in measuring their achievement of business objectives” says Gartner Group’s Nigel Rayner. “As a first step, organizations should identify appropriate metrics for their most critical business processes. Even more challenging is to identify a set of linked metrics across the business, which reflects individual, departmental and functional performance against strategic objectives. This layer is described in business, not IT terms”.

Developments in the BI Market

Recently Oracle took over Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects and IBM added Cognos to its portfolio. The Gartner Group therefore expects that the big software companies will only be able to integrate Business Intelligence with performance management ‘focus and alignment’ functionality in a couple of years. This is because of the time needed to absorb and restructure around their new, technologically and culturally contrasting acquisitions. Besides, these BI tools “can build a platform over a data warehouse, but it isn’t forward-looking, and it doesn’t break down the profit drivers of a business. You can build a lot more onto a BI platform," says Nigel Rayner. This means a risk to Business Intelligence projects conducted using these tools: a recent survey conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) found that successful Business Intelligence initiatives are almost five times more likely to have project teams in which IT is “very aligned” with the business.

Bizzscore: your strategy in focus

EFM Software has consistently build solutions like Bizzdefiner and Bizzscore around the principles of focus and alignment. The Bizzscore Suite adds value to the traditional BI solutions by helping to cascade the organizational strategy throughout the organization and providing a solution to translate the strategy into key indicators (KPI’s) relevant on each different organizational level and separate department. By adding web based questionnaires for soft measurements like customer satisfaction and employee motivation, as well as integrating the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle into the dashboard and scorecard analyses, focus and alignment really come to live in the way of solid action points.