Business Intelligence is your Product

Product integrity (HBR, 1990) represents the alignment of business processes, workflow, and the production lifecycle that yield your product or service; the end result is your customers’ experience of your company. Every process in your business must be oriented to delivering your brand to the customer.

You cannot change what you do not understand; Business Intelligence offers that understanding, of the business’s operations, strategic positioning, and your market. Business Intelligence enables the pursuit of product and organizational integrity.

Unfortunately, many companies still struggle to build significant user-adoption of their business intelligence platforms. Many approaches have been proposed to improve adoption and overall success of BI endeavors, however they miss the larger context of integrity.

Successful business intelligence investments require another layer of product-thinking: that the BI platform is itself a product, to be managed in kind, and it lays the foundation of product integrity for the enterprise.

Ultimately you want:

This requires a product paradigm;

When your BI teams start thinking in product development, the product vision becomes organizational integrity, as the paradigm drives an essential requirement of sharing and collaboration, to enable the cross-functional evolution that supports innovation for the customer.

Delivering on all this is nontrivial, but absolutely feasible even with small teams. I’ll save that for a future post.

Yes, I recognize that I’ve cited an article that’s now 25 years old, in an industry that evolves monthly. The fundamentals still stand.