Change your thinking about BI

An article on the upcoming Gartner BI conference caught my eye. The article said "Gartner research vice president Nigel Rayner will tell delegates at its Business Intelligence Summit at the end of the month, that traditional thinking around BI needs to change if businesses want to reap any benefits.
Rayner is quoted as saying:

‘BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management,’

Now it seems to me that not only does it not address the needs of senior management, it does not support the needs of operational staff either. Not management, not analysts, but people working on the front lines helping customers. It also does not help the software that support customers. Neither BI nor Performance Management will make these high-volume transaction-focused systems better. The systems cannot read reports or look at dashboards. The front-line staff have neither the time nor expertise to draw conclusions from data presented to them. Both front-line staff and front-line systems need decisions - actions to take - about customer treatment. Enterprise Decision Management or EDM is about applying your data to these front-line customer treatment decisions to improve them. BI needs to do more on Performance Management for sure, but you also need EDM to put your performance management into action and give you strategic alignment from your KPIs and dashboards to your front lines. EDM is not BI but it builds on it.

Technorati Tags: BI, Business Intelligence, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, Gartner, performance management, predictive analytics, CPM