Boston-based CFO Research Services asked 327 financial executives how quickly they could assess and disclose material changes to their companies' financial condition, when those changes resulted from a significant event. The study found that only 34% at the time said they could make a response within one or two days, but 55% said they would have that capability within 18 months.

In today's tough regulatory environments and cutthroat markets, corporate decision makers can't afford to wait passively for intelligence to be delivered by a statistics analyst in a canned report. They need to access their own information, to keep their fingers glued to the company's pulse.

As a result, enterprise decision makers are moving aggressively to improve the accuracy, quality, and immediacy of business intelligence (BI) systems. Eighty percent of respondents to the CFO Research Services survey said they planned to improve their management reporting process/system within the next 18 months; 76% planned to upgrade business performance management processes and software within that period.

Furthermore, BI is extending beyond the executive suite. "We call it BI for the masses," says Bill Baker, general manager of SQL Server Business Intelligence at Microsoft. "If you start to really use the same set of data across an entire organization, you can merge strategic, tactical, and operational decisions in productive ways."

Real-world BI
Take the case of ENECO Holding N.V., the Netherlands' third-largest energy company. The Dutch energy market became deregulated in July. Rotterdam-based ENECO needed a way to gain visibility into data that would help improve profitability and customer retention efforts.

The energy company required better insight into payables data to enable more effective control over uncollectible bill amounts. Researching causes of changes in balances typically took two weeks. And because ENECO's retail division lacked the business intelligence needed to evaluate customer value, it had difficulty developing marketing and sales strategies.

Using Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator, in combination with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft technology partner Hot ITem Informatica B.V., based in Amsterdam, built ENECO a solution with the following capabilities:

• Automated data gathering to replace data access from printed reports
• Easy access and drill-down capability on customer information and account data
• The ability to define key performance indicators and easily map them to business scorecards
• A friendly user interface for easy adoption of the solution throughout the organization

The results: a 30% gain in efficiency for billing and call center operations; a 10-million-euro reduction in accounts receivable; a 500,000-euro annual improvement to working capital; and, perhaps most important, an alignment of a distributed workforce around consistent strategy and objectives.

Decision making as business strategy
People in operations, sales, and customer service make dozens of decisions each day that have a huge cumulative effect on business. Thus, they need current and accurate intelligence to inform those decisions, as do their managers.

"In the past, high-level business strategies never translated into operational metrics," says Tim Wright, chief technology officer for the performance management software company Geac Computer Corp. Ltd., Markham, Ontario. "The first time anyone actually got to do planning was when they got a spreadsheet saying, ‘Please send me your budget.'" Performance management suites, such as the one that Geac has built on top of the Microsoft BI platform, can help customers map short-term operational initiatives directly to long-term corporate strategies and "measure performance and revise initiatives on an ongoing basis to achieve strategic objectives," says Wright.

And access to high-level intelligence can significantly improve the performance of employees who deal directly with the customer. "Suppose your sales rep has a pair of box seats to the first game of the World Series," says Microsoft's Baker. "The rep can take one customer-who does he or she take? The rep needs to weigh several factors: Who buys the most, and how much do they actually cost the company in areas like technical support?"

However, providing the intelligence to support such decisions can be a challenge. In order to maximize the World Series tickets, the sales rep may need to look at data residing in four or five different operational systems, each of which may use different customer codes, report on different time periods, and even have slightly different versions of people's names.

Lack of cross-system integration can have a negative impact on decision-making effectiveness across the corporation, says Mark Chaffin, U.S. practice director for BI at Seattle-based systems integrator Avanade Inc. "For example, an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system may define the customer differently from the sales force enablement system, so finance may not be aware of a customer that sales has been dealing with for months-until the first bill is submitted."

Furthermore, says Baker of Microsoft, "you can't expect a sales rep to get all that data lined up and do the calculation of customer net value. So you want some reasonably sophisticated stuff going on in the background so the rep can get an answer right away."

For the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), deploying a BI system resulted in improved decision making at the managerial level. A public health regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, FSIS needed a system that could automate the process of identifying trends, anomalies, and outliers (data that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the data), and thus empower managers to drive change leading to improved inspection. The managers had little technical data-querying and analysis skills, so the system needed to be intuitive and require little training.

FSIS solved the problem using the BI capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and ProClarity Professional from ProClarity Corp. Once a week, SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services extract data from FSIS's Sybase data warehouse, transform the data according to FSIS business rules, and create data analysis cubes in SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. ProClarity Professional provides sophisticated data analysis and reporting.

The payback: With one click and in less than 25 seconds, managers can access 30 interactive reports analyzing 30 million inspection activities. Previously, reports could take days or even weeks for the IT staff to produce. FSIS managers can now identify areas in need of improvement without necessarily knowing which questions to ask and without relying on the IT department to get them the answers.

That is the basis of an effective, corporatewide BI system: delivering the right information to the right people, quickly and transparently. Says Baker: "It gives you a better company with happier customers."

Elisabeth Horwitt is a freelance writer in Waban, Mass.

Illustration by Leo Espinosa