With business intelligence vendors reaching the saturation point in the marketplace of the largest and mid-sized companies in terms of sale of their product suites, many are turning their marketing attention to small and micro-sized companies. They showcase the kinds of insights that larger competitors are achieving with their tools and encourage them to think in terms of the business opportunities that even small business intelligence implementations can create for them.
But is this really a good idea?
Smaller companies necessarily operate with smaller IT budgets, and often little if any budget for business intelligence. Moreover business intelligence for most small companies falls into the category of financial reporting, with some additional attention focused on compliance, market research, or customer analysis. The truth is that in many cases what small companies are used to is operational reporting. That is, they often need little more than analysis of what has already happened: how did I go last week or last quarter, how am I doing versus this time last year, and so on.
Smaller companies may not have the obvious need for the kinds of sophisticated analytics we’ve come to identify with the biggest contributions of business intelligence at companies. That’s not to say, however, that business intelligence has no traction at a small company! To the contrary, smaller companies often have the institutional agility to bring together all their data quickly and (relatively) easily, assess and evaluate insights without bias, and adapt their business processes based on new understandings of their business, their customers, and their markets. In short, small companies can be the very best places for business intelligence to shine!
While smaller companies seldom have the luxury of seeking out and hiring individuals who have dedicated a portion or all of their careers to BI and analytics (and therefore can bring a detailed understanding of what BI’s value proposition can be for the company as well as how to accomplish that), there is nonetheless a wealth of often free information available in the market to help smaller companies make sensible BI choices given their more limited resources upon which to draw. By pursuing articles, white papers, and forum postings describing the many options available to them and some of the deployment paths that will make sense for them, smaller companies can dip their toes into the ocean of BI without having to make a serious financial commitment, such as a large, dedicated tool acquisition or expensive consulting might require.
Last of all, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the obvious: for most companies, Microsoft Excel provides one of the most powerful, flexible, inexpensive small tools that users can leverage to do analytics. I’ll leave the ìhow?î to the many articles on the Internet about doing small-scale analytics via Excel, but suffice it to say the utility of Excel matched with most users’ familiarity with its interface and its more basic functions cannot be matched.
In a future article, I’ll write more about the ways in which small companies coming from a world restricted to operational reporting can begin to delve into the dizzying and at times perplexing world of analytics and use simple tools they’re already familiar with to generate new and valuable insights for their businesses.
Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency centre. He has consulted with numerous other companies about effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
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