Need of Business Intelligence in GRC

What is Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence (BI) is an IT based technique, which is used to identify business data. It helps derive value from stored business data and provides essential business visibility by giving information about products, sales and customer behavior. BI is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing and distributing / making data available to help enterprise users to make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of Decision Support Systems (DSS), On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP), query and reporting, statistical analysis, forecasting, data mining and so on.

Business Intelligence for GRC: BI is also an essential component to a successful Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategy. With ever growing intense competition and the survival-of-the-fittest race in the ever expanding business arena these days, business needs to monitor its internal environment as well as the external environment. The goal is to maximize opportunities while mitigating or avoiding mishaps. BI plays a major role in aligning the business processes with GRC strategies as it integrates into the business environment to monitor changes, collect information, and report on the state of GRC across all IT systems in the business practice. Many or say, almost all business and organizations drafts many initiatives and projects, but not all of them can be executed, due to limitations on resources, infrastructure and budget.

Business Intelligence usage:

• Reporting - Includes the actual and how the actual stack up against the goals defined. The standard weekly / monthly reports that need to be created.
• Forecasting - Historical data helps in the forecasting of the business needs and trends.
• Dashboard - Conveys the information at a glance.
• Multidimensional analysis - It is the "slicing and dicing" of the data, offering better insight into the numbers at a more granular level.

As organizations looked for a method to properly classify the initiatives and projects depending on the priority and importance, the concept of implementing a formal IT Governance process became utter important. This has raised the importance of BI governance too. The scope of BI, however, still has been considered as a costly business exercise which may still yield no result and bear fruits after implementation.  This general perception is across many companies, which have to primarily think about the expenses they may have to spend on business practices.

But, isn’t it always best to have a clear road map when on a highway to reach a destination rather than just driving or sailing across on just mere assumptions? BI governance may give road map listing out priorities on what needs to be undertaken first.  Consider what if you were on a highway without any milestones and directions to reach a destination city.

It is BI’s responsibility to provide a roadmap at the right place, right time and to the right people.

• It will direct creating a data model that supports the business needs.
• It will direct responsibility to implement the appropriate data integration framework to populate the created data model.
• It will interact heavily with the business users to define the report and standards to follow.
• It will keep the solution in check with the set standards of the organization.

Not just these, BI governance will also assist in creating the material that will be used to train the end users, and thus create an infrastructure to train them in an effective manner.

To stay ahead in the competition, one needs to make sound business decisions that are accurate and up-to-date in the business. Statistical data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business fetch valuable information from data marts / data warehouse; these tools collectively fall into a category called "Business Intelligence".

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About Author:

Dimpy Thurakhia is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at dimpy.t@spluspl.com