The Rapid Adoption of Business Intelligence
This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Enterprise Intelligence." The speaker is Jessica Little, Marketing Manager at InetSoft.
But what's happening because of the rapid adoption of business intelligence, the customer intelligence and this holistic enterprise intelligence view, total spending will be down in the $30 billion range. But more importantly, the dramatic reduction in the percentage of that being spent on administrative roles will be leveraged by higher investments and technology that deliver better results.
To simplify this concept, maybe we should take a look at this as a formula. Customer intelligence is knowing everything that you can know about your customer base individually, collectively, market segments, all of those things that we have talked about under the CRM name.
Business intelligence, again, is understanding what's underlying your business, what is the data that you have, how can it be used, structured and brought together to be effectively leveraged in the business. Now, all of that is good and well, but without something that we are calling intelligent delivery, it can't be used.
What Is Intelligent BI Delivery?
Intelligent delivery will be a topic that we continue to talk about throughout this presentation in different ways. But intelligent delivery means that it is usable, pertinent, current and available to the right user at the right time. Only by combing all three of these do we get actionable knowledge. Now, this formula, what it really does is it frees information that’s been trapped in the enterprise. It improves the speed and quality of information flow throughout the enterprise, and it leverages operating cost. In other words, it enables knowledge workers in today’s world.
But the key issue about anything that you are working in on the intelligent side is that data must be mined, managed, leveraged, and adopted. And the key issue in adoption is that not everybody will use information that is given to them unless they find that it can directly help them in what they are trying to accomplish today at this very moment. And that’s when where new technologies need to play a key role in making information easily usable and available.
Another thing that we need to keep in mind is that we believe in enterprise intelligence is the glue between the marketplace and financial services. If you look on the left hand side, we talked about all the keys to organic growth, building customer loyalty through satisfaction, customer experience, customer engagement and managing the business processes associated with that.
On the far right, you see that technology has several initiatives, and again there is a process and relationship management issue that’s associated with technology as well. But we have all known for years that the business and technology sides of financial services have a challenge in communicating with each other.
Develop a Common BI Language
In business intelligence, customer intelligence and knowledge management, all of these things you see on the intelligence side, it becomes a common language for technology people and business people in coming together and serving the marketplace in a better way. And again, process management is important in all three because every function within a financial institution or every function that a customer experiences has a process associated with it, and managing that process is critical to being successful in gaining and leveraging the intelligence successfully.
So what are some of the challenges involved with becoming confident in enterprise intelligence? We are not going to spend a lot of time on this because those of you in the financial services industry understand these all too well.
Pretty clearly, siloed architectures compound the ability to use information in the institution. On the right hand side from the bottom up, you can see that we have all the different product systems. We have business silos, including third parties and alliances where sometimes information is not available at all, and you have no visibility into what they are doing in their alliance capacity with you.
Delivery channels are continuing to expand, and the mobility side of things is rapidly growing on a global basis to include iPads, cell phones as well as other mobile devices that are going to be delivered in financial services and where transactions are now rapidly becoming part of the normal delivery mechanism.
The StyleBI Adoption Experience for a Document Forensics Company
When most people think about business intelligence adoption, their minds go immediately to mainstream sectors like retail, finance, or manufacturing. Yet, one of the most fascinating stories comes from a company in the document forensics industry, a highly specialized and relatively obscure niche that focuses on analyzing, authenticating, and preserving critical documents for legal, historical, and security purposes. This company, which we’ll call Document Integrity Services, had long struggled with managing vast datasets that included scanned images, metadata, verification logs, and case histories. The transition to StyleBI became not just a technology upgrade but a pivotal transformation in how the company managed transparency, reporting, and client trust.
Before StyleBI, Document Integrity Services relied heavily on a mix of manual reporting and outdated visualization tools. Analysts would often export raw case data into spreadsheets, where they attempted to track trends in document tampering methods, turnaround times for forensic reviews, and compliance with evolving legal standards. The process was slow, fragmented, and highly dependent on a few key experts who knew how to manipulate the data. This bottleneck became unsustainable as the company scaled to handle more international cases, especially with the rise of digital forgery and the growing need to authenticate electronic documents. Leadership recognized that they needed a business intelligence solution capable of unifying their diverse data sources and presenting insights in real time.
The adoption of StyleBI was not approached lightly. The company set up a pilot program with a dedicated team of forensic analysts, IT staff, and client relations managers. What stood out immediately was StyleBI’s flexibility in integrating with both structured data from relational databases and unstructured sources like scanned document repositories. Instead of having to rely on separate tools for different data types, the team could mash up everything in one platform. This created a holistic view of operations that had been impossible before. For instance, analysts could now correlate the frequency of specific tampering techniques with geographic regions and quickly generate visual dashboards to share with clients and regulators.
Another aspect of the adoption experience was the ease of user onboarding. The company had been concerned that analysts, many of whom had backgrounds in law enforcement and archival sciences rather than technology, would resist the new system. However, StyleBI’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface turned out to be a key advantage. Training sessions that were initially scheduled to run for weeks ended up taking only a few days. Analysts were soon building their own dashboards to track case progress, turnaround time metrics, and compliance rates, without needing to request IT assistance. This shift empowered employees and reduced dependence on technical bottlenecks.
The leadership team particularly valued the ability to design client-facing dashboards. Before StyleBI, clients would often receive static PDF reports that were out of date by the time they were shared. With the new system, clients gained access to live dashboards, where they could monitor the status of their document verification cases, see projected completion times, and even view trend analyses of their document submissions. This increased transparency had a direct impact on client satisfaction and retention. For a company whose reputation relies heavily on credibility and reliability, this was a game-changing improvement.
Adoption did come with challenges, of course. The integration phase required careful mapping of legacy data, and some resistance emerged among staff who were used to “their way” of reporting. But the company invested in change management, demonstrating early wins such as faster turnaround times and automated compliance reporting. Over time, even skeptics saw the value of a centralized, powerful BI platform. Within six months, the company declared the adoption a success, reporting significant reductions in reporting errors, a 40% decrease in manual report preparation time, and improved case throughput. Clients noticed the difference, and internal teams found themselves spending less time wrestling with data and more time applying forensic expertise.
Ultimately, the adoption experience of StyleBI for Document Integrity Services shows that even in obscure industries like document forensics, modern business intelligence tools can deliver transformative benefits. By streamlining workflows, empowering non-technical staff, and improving client transparency, StyleBI positioned the company for sustained growth in a niche where trust, accuracy, and efficiency are everything.
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