Business Intelligence as Change Agent - Putting the Cart before the Horse

We’ve heard it again and again from the perhaps-too-cautious customer, “Let’s not get the cart before the horse,” which in business intelligence-speak translates to: “Let’s wait until we get the data perfectly right, then we can work on our data visualization.”

I’ve always believed this is the wrong approach as data visualization has an uncanny ability of  providing unanticipated benefits, and why wait when the data can prove valuable right away. Data visualization done early and often provides strong returns on investments and benefits like:

• Sussing out what data is really important to decision making; why spend dollars and time prepping data when better decisions can be made now?
  
• Making it clear and evident what data actually is bad
  
• Fostering what might be called data exploration and discovery; set your data free in your organization and see what value is derived

It’s with relish, then, that I read a recent article on Filippo Passerini, Procter & Gamble’s forward-thinking CIO, in Information Week magazine. His strategy? “We intentionally put the cart before the horse, because it is a way to force change.” To Passerini, companies have for years “tried to gather all the right data, build the high-powered data marts to support it, and only then build decision-support tools to exploit the data. And that approach hasn't worked.”

We here at IDV would concur. Our enterprise customers are using Visual Fusion software in all sorts of use cases to bring positive change to their organizations: from physical security monitoring and situational awareness, to sales and marketing campaign planning. So go ahead and put the cart before the horse, and see how data visualization can bring business change.


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