The media love to feed us lots of statistics, from exam results and crime figures to the number of hours the nation spends watching the television. Recently they’ve been able to provide us with a deluge of numbers and charts about the economy, climate change and the election. Most of us like to read these; it gives us something to base our views on, even if we are all familiar with the phrase about lies, damned lies and statistics.
Given our love affair with statistics away from work, it’s amazing how many organisations still collect lots of data without trying to analyse it in ways that will improve their performance. All companies do the obvious, mandatory stuff like accounts and management reporting, but few try to extract the information that might lead them to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Of course, there are IT systems to help you do this and, of course, there’s an acronym for the whole concept – BI – Business Intelligence. The good news is that BI software is getting easier to use and cheaper to buy and, yes, there is an app for that with plenty of BI tools available for iPhones and other smartphones.
It’s important to understand that BI isn’t just another name for report writing. It’s about being able to join up all of your different sets of data and look at them in new and different ways, not just the way that somebody decided was right years ago. It’s this flexibility, coupled with some compelling presentation options, that allows BI to help us reach valuable decisions about our organisations.
Apparently 75% of all BI users are of above average intelligence. Also, according to Vic Reeves, 88.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.