Early Business Intelligence Needs

I have been surveying BIS systems lately, it makes me think of the early days of these systems and their presentation methods. In about 1980 I was asked to help Owen 'Brad' Butler (right) then chairman of Procter & Gamble, to work with some data that he had personally gathered that dealt with sales district costs, financial forecasts and regional profitability. This was about the same year that the first spreadsheet, Visicalc, went public. IBM had loaned him an early and likely very expensive desktop machine, the IBM 5120. It had minimal memory, a floppy disk drive and a BASIC interpreter.

He had already sketched out what he wanted, a simple means to track and visualize trends. It also had to be interactive, allowing him to test alternative hypotheses. He pioneered understanding the need for these capabilities. He and I collaboratively coded a simple business intelligence system and what became our first executive information system. The system was then used for several years with considerable updating until spreadsheets became common.

It then took quite some time before interactive BIS was used again in the executive suite. Butler's system succeeded better than some later BIS systems because it had the direct support of an executive. Later attempts at this kind of transparency did not work as well because the data was not stable and could not be trusted by a broader range of users.

Today there are dozens of BIS packages, most integrating extensive statistics and visualization capabilities. Since the early executive tests I have been involved with a number of them, always attempting to mix ease-of-use and key data integration needs and trust. Labeling these EIS or 'dashboards' or 'war rooms' is not enough. You have to deliver real value very quickly.

The need for this capability for the executive, carefully considered, existed from the early days of personally available computing. It is still not easy to sell the tailored dashboards required for broad ranges of executives.

Contact me for more details, or to help with a BIS or visualization task. My contact address is franzdill atsign gmail.com -