Website Wireframes have been always been an essential tool for capturing user interface requirements. They have been very effective in ideating, discussing and capturing the UI requirements for a new website. They have been an essential mode of communication for web designers to express their designs to clients and developers alike. But over the last few years, the rules of the game have changed threatening to make the art of wireframing obsolete.
There are times when a company wants to change the way they are working in order to bring in efficiencies at different levels. This change has become mandatory to them because their current processes or systems are not able to help them meet their strategic goals and therefore making a negative impact on their overall performance. In such cases the company management decides to change systems that they think are causing the bottleneck and embarks on a mission that will remove the bottlenecks or implement a new system that will help them perform certain functions better and faster. Such initiatives can help them meet their immediate goal or solve the problem they are facing. In the long term these bottlenecks will start surfacing again in different forms. Even well thought long term solutions need to be revamped and modified periodically but the cost of doing this will be much lesser because this will be done less frequently and changes can be controlled. Therefore, it is very critical for a company to know if the decision they are making about implementing a new project is right or not.
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Part 2: What companies should do to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation?
A BI system implementation should aim at getting an accurate picture of the current performance of the enterprise. The BI system should be capable of responding to changes in the market. It should be able to integrate financial consolidation with the operational performance. Basically, a BI system should be able to guide the enterprise in the right direction after deriving insights from the current data that is fed into the system.
Part 1: Why companies fail to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation?
When companies grow they need systems that will streamline and optimize operation performance, help them in making better decision based on data and trends and come up with strategies that are in line with the business goals of the organization. This is possible through Business Intelligence. In an effort to implement a BI system, companies either plan to (1) have a team that will be dedicated to write the software, (2) outsource the job of developing the systems to a vendor or (3) implement a product that will meet the BI requirements. Option (3) is, in most cases, better than option (1) and (2) because it can be implemented faster and in most cases will cost lesser. The most important factors of a BI implementation is to know and understand why BI is required, the goals that should be met, the strategies that will help in meeting the goals and product that will fit the immediate and the long term needs of the organization. Reports say that companies, over a period of time have purchased and implemented different BI products under different leaderships. CIOs come and go and they leave their mark in the company in terms of a product implementation or changes to the software environment based on what they feel are the best. This drains out the resources of the company and never gets them what they really want. In this article, I will try to focus on how a company can take the right steps to successfully implement a BI system that will meet the strategic business goals of the company.
