Page 101 -

80 CHAPTER 7 Assess

Business Benefits and Ramifications

Collaborative business intelligence communities often establish more efficient relationships that drive
new business actions as information and knowledge residing throughout the organization are opti-
mized. The benefit of managing collaboration is that business areas, once fully engaged through these
collaborative communities or mechanisms, can be measured and given feedback that they can use to
improve not only the business, but also their own work processes.
Approach Considerations

The existence of large amounts of Lotus Notes or SharePoint data may require a spin-off assessment,
as many organizations wake up one day to find out they cannot control or afford any more Notes and
SharePoint sites. They tend to multiply like rodents. Otherwise, this is a fairly straightforward
assessment.
Sample Output

Figure 7-9 shows some interview and survey results from another case study: Farfel Emporiums. Farfel
has one collaborative mechanism, FarfelNet, which was developed to support the merchandising area.
It is a website that allows access to merchandiser notes, proposals, supplier catalogs, and purchase
orders for merchandise.

Collaborative Assessment Results Summary
1. FarfelNet keeps the merchandiser in front of the desktop waiting for
information, rather than in front of the supplier making the deal.
2. The catalog information is always one quarter old. During the holidays, it
is useless.
3. All merchandisers have their own “system” for managing suppliers,
looking for trends, and maintaining catalog entries.
4. Representative FarfelNet survey responses:
a. The overall organization of FarfelNet needs to be simplified. I find
it very difficult to find presentations, brochures, etc. Navigating
through the Menu ultimately results in a search, and the search box
most often results in no documents found.
b. Very often, I'm not able to find what I'm looking for or the relevant
documents are not so immediately in evidence.
c. Why do we use SharePoint? All we do is spread out old messes
into new messes. We are wasting the potential for sharing.
d. Also, I find it hard to have to look at multiple websites for
competitors.
e. FarfelNet does not provide the productive work environment the
Farfel merchandisers require to meet corporate objectives.
FIGURE 7-9
Farfel Collaborative Readiness Assessment.