way to leverage their advantages in speed and
agility while ensuring profitable and sustained
growth. Otherwise, they risk their organization
either being made irrelevant by competitors or
being swallowed by someone larger. Profitable
growth is a balancing act of multiple levers that
executives have at their disposal. Pulling the
right levers on a consistent basis requires clear
insights into the business so leaders can prioritize their most important issues and then make
diligent and informed decisions to proactively
address them.
Information needed to make such decisions
is typically buried under all the data within an
organization’s enterprise business systems.
Most midsized companies use manual methods
to gain insights – such as gathering data from
their system using reports and extracts, mas-
saging this data manually in spreadsheets, and
then emailing handmade spreadsheets around
the company. These spreadsheet-based reports
serve as the nerve center of what is happening
across the business at various levels of detail. As
status reports, they also serve as either a start-
ing point or an update for all budgeting and
planning activities that are also managed via
multiple spreadsheets.
Soon the entire organization is drowning in
spreadsheets. Multiple spreadsheets floating in
email systems and on personal desktops/lap-
tops create possible version control issues. In
addition, spreadsheets do not have checks and
balances when entering or updating data, so
errors can easily creep in, creating a potential
accuracy issue. As a result, midsized organiza-
tions find their planning, budgeting and report-
ing processes to be chaotic and error prone. De-
lays in updating manually created spreadsheets
leave organizations without access to the most
current operational performance metrics. And
due to the architecture of spreadsheets, they
find it very difficult to drill into the data to get
to the root of the matter. As a result, they can’t
put their finger on the pulse of the operations
quickly enough to make data-driven decisions
or course corrections. Very often, data-driven
decision-making processes revert back to gut
instinct-driven choices.
BI Addresses Spreadsheet Chaos
Business intelligence addresses all the issues
we’ve mentioned for midsized companies. BI
helps turn data from financial, manufacturing
and sales systems into useful and meaningful information to be distributed to those that need it,
when they need it, so every manager within the
company can make timely and better-informed
decisions. It enables midsized companies to leverage their speed by succinctly surfacing what
is working and what is not on an ongoing basis,
showing the impact on the business and allowing
them to correctly prioritize and rapidly act/re-act. It enables focus by providing every manager
within the organization the same version of
“BI enables midsized companies to
leverage their speed by succinctly
surfacing what is working and what is
not on an ongoing basis.”
