Below is the transcript from a Webcast video from InetSoft Technology. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.
Mike Bord: So normally we wouldn’t think of business intelligence as something that really an IT Pro would have paid much of an attention to.
Mark Flaherty: Sure, that’s fair. Usually the business side has demands for different BI solutions and those trickle down in IT to where I have had to support those business requirements. What we are trying to do more and more now is actually show IT or build custom solutions for IT so they can better manage their IT systems. So actually making IT an end user out at the Microsoft Business Intelligence products and I can actually whiteboard one of the solutions that we are coming out with.
Bord: Yeah. So before you whiteboard let me ask you one question. Those people who really haven’t grasped on or grabbed a hold of what business intelligence is, give us the 30 second blowdown so that anybody even new could kind of understand what we are going to talk about.
Flaherty: Sure. So business intelligence is about getting access to information that can help you make better more relevant business decisions. So for example it spans across any role that you have inside your organization right down from somebody who’s working in a bank trying to decide whether or not to give somebody a loan, being able to feed them the information that they need to be able to make that decision all the way up to the CEO who runs the business and needs to know sort of high level metrics.
Bord: So, what are the IT pros kind of missing with business intelligence right now? How can business intelligence really help us as IT pros?
Flaherty: Well business intelligence, a large component of that is performance management so being able to manage and understand what’s happening in your business or for the IT pro inside of your IT department. So, knowing and setting matrix to monitor the performance of IT infrastructure is one of the ways that you can use BI in the IT department.
Bord: So it’s really going beyond the event log, going beyond watching your performance calendar for an hour straight, it’s taking it to the next level?
Flaherty: Yeah it's understanding what's happening and being able dive into the data behind why something happened and getting sort of the root cause behind it so that you can course correct and make changes to make the system as a whole better.
"Performance management will become more pervasive within organizations. If you’re old enough, like me, think back to the days when computers were first being introduced into people’s offices, when personal computers first came out. The senior managers at that time were not computer savvy, to put it kindly. Yet, they understood there were computers, and that they were these big refrigerator-sized boxes found in the back office and operations departments. But these managers didn’t have a personal relationship with their computers.
But nevertheless, executives would get their PCAT, and they would put it in the corner, and it would have the green c prompt burned into the screen. They typically wouldn’t fire up any applications unless someone was coming to the office to visit them, so they could show them they were computer savvy.
Eventually that changed. Why did that change? Because the next generation of managers came along, and they had been exposed to computers, they were comfortable with computers. They were actively using computers." - Mark Flaherty, CMO, InetSoft
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