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496 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

• Managerial users and methods: Business intelligence hardware and
software are only as intelligent as the human beings who use them. Managers
impose order on the analysis of data using a variety of managerial methods
that define strategic business goals and specify how progress will be
measured. These include business performance management and balanced
scorecard approaches focusing on key performance indicators and industry
strategic analyses focusing on changes in the general business environment,
with special attention to competitors. Without strong senior management
oversight, business analytics can produce a great deal of information, reports,
and online screens that focus on the wrong matters and divert attention
from the real issues. You need to remember that, so far, only humans can ask
intelligent questions.

• Delivery platform—MIS, DSS, ESS: The results from business intelligence
and analytics are delivered to managers and employees in a variety of ways,
depending on what they need to know to perform their jobs. MIS, DSS, and
ESS, which we introduced in Chapter 2, deliver information and knowledge
to different people and levels in the firm—operational employees, middle
managers, and senior executives. In the past, these systems could not share
data and operated as independent systems. Today, one suite of hardware and
software tools in the form of a business intelligence and analytics package
is able to integrate all this information and bring it to managers’ desktop or
mobile platforms.

• User interface: Business people are no longer tied to their desks and
desktops. They often learn quicker from a visual representation of data than
from a dry report with columns and rows of information. Today’s business
analytics software suites emphasize visual techniques such as dashboards and
scorecards. They also are able to deliver reports on BlackBerrys, iPhones, and
other mobile handhelds as well as on the firm’s Web portal. BA software is
adding capabilities to post information on Twitter, Facebook, or internal social
media to support decision making in an online group setting rather than in a
face-to-face meeting.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS
CAPABILITIES

Business intelligence and analytics promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time
information to decision makers, and the analytic tools help them quickly
understand the information and take action. There are six analytic functional-
ities that BI systems deliver to achieve these ends:
• Production reports: These are predefined reports based on industry-
specific requirements (see Table 12.5).
• Parameterized reports: Users enter several parameters as in a pivot table
to filter data and isolate impacts of parameters. For instance, you might want
to enter region and time of day to understand how sales of a product vary
by region and time. If you were Starbucks, you might find that customers in
the East buy most of their coffee in the morning, whereas in the Northwest
customers buy coffee throughout the day. This finding might lead to different
marketing and ad campaigns in each region. (See the discussion of pivot
tables in Section 12.3.)
• Dashboards/scorecards: These are visual tools for presenting performance
data defined by users.
• Ad hoc query/search/report creation: These allow users to create their
own reports based on queries and searches.

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