Improving strategies and enriching decision-making processes in companies is what the information revolution offers through Business Intelligence. Little by little, organizations are making way for the evolution of data to generate a better concept of planning and internal and external strategy within the business.
Making changes of any kind generates certain doubts and tests the capacity of those involved. Implementing Business Intelligence as part of the company's strategy implies considering and overcoming a series of challenges that entail threats, but also a door to great opportunities for improvement.
If you get into a technology project in general, you are going to focus attention, you are going to send people to train them, and if you don't have top-level sponsorship, if your board of directors is telling you that they always run the business without that data, that intuition is what's important, that's where you start with problems.
We started with the Business Intelligence project and we realized that we had to train people, clean the data and suddenly the project was expensive, involved organizational change and was not planned.
When it comes to implementing BI, the business rules are not so clear, that when it comes to prioritizing we have to work with the processes, but they were not well documented, the rules were not well understood and our project begins to grow in complexity and costs.
It is a threat. We don't have a culture of transparency in Latin America. Not all companies feel comfortable recording all their operations, for whatever reasons, and that is a problem, because if I want to use my data well throughout the processes, I may have to go through the whole data management process and make sure that all the data is being recorded.
There are investments that are easy to measure if human labor is being replaced. We have done projects where I had a group of executives who spent two days assembling the information and now those two days are free, so I know how much they earn, how many they are and multiplied by the two days, I know how much is the return on investment. The other source is the improvement in the quality of the investments, how do I capture that and how do I manage it?
Most companies are divided into departmental silos. All these fractures in natural silos in all companies make it difficult to see the processes from beginning to end and the data we need is generated throughout the entire process. By using BI tools we are not going to end up affecting departments, but affecting processes.
Excerpt from the Webinar "Business Intelligence: recommendations for a successful implementation in Latin American companies" by Professor Juan Carlos Barahona, Academic Director of the Business Intelligence program.
