Employees experience the insight of a CFO, thanks to pervasive BI

If Y2K is remembered for getting companies to buy new hardware and upgrade old software, the latest driver of change, Sarbanes-Oxley, will be remembered for democratizing information and making accountability a companywide responsibility. Its reporting requirements make it mandatory that businesses hold everyone's feet to the fire.

Enter pervasive BI. Sometimes called situational BI, pervasive BI will mean that management at every level of the organization has access to intelligence and key performance indicators that are relevant and actionable. It ensures that the same kind of information is disseminated at every level down the chain -- divisional, departmental, and regional -- to a local team leader using the same dashboard interface.

By democratizing access to information further down the org chart, you get information closer to the folks doing the work, who are better situated to react more quickly to a particular issue or problem.

For example, an employee at ABN AMRO, one of the world's largest banks, recently noticed that the transactions in the workflow were stuck at a particular step. It turns out a printer was down.

The good news is that companies can build pervasive BI on existing technology, rather than ripping and replacing, according to Lawrence DeVoe, vice president of business development at Citigate Hudson, an IT services provider specializing in BI.

PeopleSoft has a portal solution, for instance, that shows CFOs the DSO (day sales outstanding) -- a key metric that is material to a company's financial statement. That same portal solution is now available to divisional controllers to monitor DSO for their divisions.

However, Joseph Rahaim, vice president of the financial services group at Capgemini, says IT must be sure that its BI capability is scalable for tens of thousands of users. It has to integrate data from multiple data sources in real time and even monitor events in transactional applications in order to get that real-time snapshot. It also must support the company's business processes and applications.

"You need domain expertise to make sure that [BI] is implemented in a way that people will use," Rahaim tells me.

Also, when you deploy a BI application to thousands of users, per-user licensing isn't practical. A CPU or concurrent license makes more sense. 

Richard Guth, vice president of solutions at Actuate, says one enterprise customer went from 200 users of its financial variance reporting application to thousands of users in a nine-month period.

"Once they got that working, they wanted to roll it out to anyone in the company that had any type of budget or revenue responsibility," Guth says.

Now, one in 10 employees receives a nightly financial report from Actuate, customized for that employee's "little world," Guth says.

Obviously, wide dissemination of key competitive data is a security concern, as is the less-obvious risk of inaccuracy. Susan Kane, vice president of product marketing at PeopleSoft Financial Management Solutions, says that it is critical to make sure that everyone is working off the same data -- one version of the truth, as they say.

When the digital age dawned, everyone expected decisions would be based on real data -- facts, rather than some kind of gut-level business intuition. Anyone who has ever sat in on a executive meeting knows that never really happened; but with pervasive BI, perhaps it finally will.