At an executive roundtable, “Business Intelligence: Monitoring the Pulse of Your Organization,” Nigel Geary, spoke to a group of executives about business intelligence (BI).

“I think BI’s aim is to make the user self-sufficient,” Geary said to a group of surprised-looking attendees. “If the sales and marketing person can do their own BI, than that is a healthier company and it releases IT to do other things.”

Geary said BI is not just about system reporting and spreadsheet extracts, but is a reliable tool for looking at trends, data and performance.

“Sales people can see how they are performing on a daily basis,” he said, adding that BI should be accessible to everyone in a company.

According to Geary, most BI systems “break an integrated ERP application into ‘stove pipes’ for BI analysis. This means sales is looking at one cube of information and finance is looking at another cube. This separate BI system causes data reconciliation problems.

“We have decided to remove the stove pipes and make everything in one place, we try to take these main sources of data and integrate them into one database. Everything comes into one table and if you’ve got that one source, it is very easy to build a single cube.”