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What's Missing: Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is an industry term that covers a wide variety of information functions in a business. Another industry term recently came out called Competitor Intelligence, or otherwise known as Competitive Intelligence. Each of this concepts covers both market research and financial analysis as a means to keep up with rapidly growing complexities in the marketplace. Such complexities created a need to partner with other businesses for profitability, demand in understanding the Threats and Opportunities as well as identification of Strengths and Weaknesses. Overall, the process of integration, analysis, measurement and reporting of operational data enables the enterprise to work smarter and adapt quickly to changing market landscape. You will notice that the process is identical with very low percentages of differences between Competitive Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Executive Intelligence and Security Intelligence. All these concepts, workflow, process or knowledge rely on nothing more than “Information” – from internal source where majority of Business Intelligence tools are available. Information on the following categories adaptable to Enterprise, Organization or Government formed the centerpiece of the intelligence; List – 1: Departmental Intelligence Requirements
Given the diagram above, we can propose the term “Information Intelligence” as Unified Intelligence terminology. It will serve as the umbrella for Business Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, Executive Intelligence and Security Intelligence. Along the same analogy we can further state, “Effective utilization of Information Intelligence will lead to competitive advantage in Information Economy” Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that less than 12 percent of middle management are employed in the field of industrial production. Thus the decline in Manufacturing Economy give rise to Information Economy. This means that instead of making things, we are processing information. It takes “know-how” to make things or process information, thus the importance of knowing how to do it becomes an asset. The raw materials of Information Economy are, theories, ideas, computer programs, workflow design, business rules, laboratory test results documents, etc. Effective management of these raw materials will lead to the discovery of Information Intelligence. As an example, a large measure of success for retailers is a result of their real-time data mining of daily sale activities driving the effective and state-of-the-art information technology management of inventory and tracking systems. While retailers are selling tangible products, the intangible knowledge they manage helps them get bigger and more profitable. And for a company to be successful, it must fully understand their potential in terms of intellectual capital or Information Intelligence to compete effectively in the Information Economy. We propose a requirement for a tool that will either manually or automatically categorized the information based on six departmental intelligence groups (See Figure-1). With the adoption of single unified intelligence terminology called “Information Intelligence”, we avoid too many buzzwords, which not only create confusion for example, BI can mean Business Intelligence or Business Integration? II – State of Information Intelligence Research: Based on IDC (http://www.idc.com), a premier global market intelligence and advisory firm, that Business Intelligence software comprises the following tools to accomplish the following:
In a typical Collaborative, Decision-Making Workflow, a “Close-Loop Model Application” defined below with process name (Analyze, Model, Decide, Adjust/Act, Track) and corresponding departmental categories on transactional side or internal business drivers and corresponding BI tools on Analytic side Figure – 2: Close-loop Model Application 
On transactional side, the following categories fall on this group: Call Center, Marketing, Web, Financials, Inventory, Procurement and External (Read - Second Curve Intelligence Analytics and Usefulness of Unstructured Data). At the Analytic group you only have Business Intelligence Tools and Analytic Applications. Further breaking down the detailed activities per process you will have the following results:
The other part of decision making activities centers around outside or external research activities conducted by company analyst and strategic planners for medium to large corporations and almost non-existent for small businesses. There are two levels of tools available to conduct research and to produce end results vital for decision makers when it comes to analyzing threats and opportunities. Tool Level I – (Approximate Price/Capability: $250.00 - $500.00) This level of business intelligence production is accomplished using common office software such as; Microsoft’s Excel, Word, Access, PowePoint for Windows environment. For Unix or Linux, you have StarOffice from Sun (http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/) or an Open Source Office Software equivalent called OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). Small business or even Medium and sometimes Large Corporations use this tool to transmit and communicate information to managers by their employees certain information he/she found over the web, news article, trade magazines, or email. On a formal level, researcher (employee) uses spreadsheet and word processor to "Plan or Track", Internet browser or word processor for "Rapid Retrieval or Adjust/Act", file manager or windows explorer to "Organize or Model", spreadsheet and word processor to "Analyze", and presentation (PowerPoint or similar tool), word processor for document and HTML format to "Communicate or Decide". There are several drawbacks at this level. It takes considerable amount of time in planning, organizing, analyzing, and producing communicable presentation. It takes a lot of computer skills and software proficiencies on several office software applications. The information is not stored on a database, which can be accomplished by adding another office database software, for example Microsoft Access. Imagine you have to do this process daily or even weekly to keep up with decision-making requirements. Since information is not stored in a database, there is no availability for third-party intelligence analytical tools that can be applied. No collaboration support with other business intelligence initiatives due to stand-alone nature of the process. Tool Level II – (Approximate Price/Capability: $2,500.00 - $100,000.00+) Utilizing other software besides common office software for the purpose of Business Intelligence is considered to be at this level. Tools at this level may or may not use the common office software as part of the Close-loop Model Application (Consult List-2 and Figure-2). Generally, at this level persistence or database storage of researched intelligence information is being conducted. Tool such as Extraction, Transport, Load or ETL can be programmed to run automatically to extract pre-defined and pre-configured database structured query language or SQL against table or combination of tables to identify for example “Top 10% profit by location, product or combination. Also, at this level certain skills are required in addition to database proficiencies in a specific area of Data Mart and Data Warehousing Dimensional Modeling. Knowledge in Kimball Methodology (http://www.rkimball.com/) is a definite advantage. With this type of environment, there is a full-time Database Administrator and Information Technology Department that will assist in all technical requirements to fulfill almost any Strategic Planning or Business Intelligence initiatives. There may also exist other software tools for visualizing database records into meaningful patterns. As with analyst or strategic planners, their information research can be compiled and stored in the database if they use common office software with an extra step of converting the information into neutral data formats such as, comma-delimited, tab-delimited, space-delimited or text. For analysis tool, there are several choices to choose from depending on the capabilities but there is a significant amount of learning curve in mastering these tools. What’s missing is a software intelligence tool that is priced at Level-1 ($250-$500) and has the following features:
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