Business Intelligence or Empathizing with your boss
I know that some bosses (or leader) are potatoes, they are USELESS. But not everybody’s boss is useless.
There are bosses, managers or mid-bosses that work hard, really hard, some of them, over-work hard even during the weekends, holidays and such.
Some people think that all bosses are useless. They are not thinking about bosses but sons of bosses, I want to be the son of a boss.
But let’s say that a business has a busy boss. He(or she) doesn’t have much time to deal with details. It is not rare to find a boss that spend more time traveling or going from meeting to a meeting than in their own office.
So, we have an important person that MUST TAKE BUSINESS DECISIONS, but he/she doesn’t have time talk with each other.
So, he/she could ask a simple question:
Status report?
Or, what’s the advance of the project?, what is the number of sales? etc.
And it’s here Business Intelligence shines.
Of course, business intelligence needs, ahem, intelligence.
Business decisions are take by a manager, however the source of it, it must be data.
I know some managers that takes decisions by “guts” or “I think of”. Of course, they usually fail. It is easy to take decision with information while it’s silly to take a blind decision.
Business intelligence is not a silver bullet and it could be faked/forged/cheated but again, it requires intelligence. And it is better to ask people, people (especially brown-noser), lie.
For example, you are a captain and you will need to lower the number of casualities per mission.
So, what you will do?
To paint the red t-shirt as yellow? Sorry but nay. The goal is to minimize the difficulty of the mission or to take less dangerous missions. Or maybe, if the mission is hard then, let’s nuke from orbit.
So, what is the root cause of casualities? It’s the level of difficulty. It sounds easy? Of course not (easier said than done) but you are the captain so it’s you work to find the solution. Maybe you lack enough information. It is not rare to find a business intellicence dashboard with dozen of charts.
Conclusion
Business intelligence is not infallible, but it’s worse to work without it. And trust me, in my experience, there are SO MANY businesses that drive blind.
