Predictive Business Intelligence.
How technology enhances the role of C-Levels.

The biggest plus side of the evolution of technology over the last few years is the ability to demonstrate that it plays a central role in the development of the company’s business. For a long time, indeed, the overall impression was of a component necessary for the company’s production, but with too high a price to pay in terms of use, maintenance and start-up and operating costs. Now, its variants – such as Predictive Business Intelligence – are able to carry out a fundamental job in terms of corporate reputation. 

Great help has come from the tools provided to consumer users, who are also corporate employees, from smartphones and computers and from the increasingly mainstream web services. Today, everyone is aware of the potential of technology because they experience it directly, up to the point of playing the role of promoter within the company itself, a phenomenon of which BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is only the most striking example. 

Its elevation from the role of niche topic discussed only in corporate IT teams, after initial lack of understanding from CIOs, has led to an expansion of the dialog that, finally with full knowledge of the facts, involves all others with corporate budget responsibility: the CFO, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), and Chief HR Officer, as well as the other C-Levels, are now responsible for the budget (always in agreement with the CIO) for technological solutions that optimize the processes of their division, while benefiting the entire company, however. 

The trend, in addition to the honor of participating directly in technology choices, has also led to greater accountability towards the business for all division managers. But also to a new awareness of the leadership role in different areas.

Business Intelligence, even before the explosion of the Big Data trend, is perhaps the technological component that for the first time has proven able to overcome resistance and demonstrate its value outside the CIO’s offices. The managers involved in this (also cultural) transformation certainly include the CFO(Chief Financial Officer), who finds themselves facing new challenges, often in international contexts.

Today we are faced with a mature technology that pervades multiple business areas, one in particular being that managed by the CFO. 

More specifically, we can summarize the evolutionary scenarios of Business Intelligence technologies with five main trends:

• Fine-tuning machine learning. The use of Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, is already providing great decision-making support to the different business sectors. However, further efforts are needed to fine-tune the algorithms and make them more precise and, above all, to allow managers to interpret them quickly.
• Conversing with data. The trend in the near future will be the ability to establish a real conversation between the manager and the machine without this requiring special skills. The objective of the conversation will be to make the algorithm understand the person’s precise requirements and refine itself as a consequence. 
• Making data “actionable”. The next Business Intelligence systems will need to make data automatically and quickly actionable. It will be essential for the algorithm to sift through all the collected data and identify what is really useful to the relevant manager, facilitating the transformation of this information into immediate processes.  
• Making them interpretable. We have already mentioned this, but the topic deserves its own analysis. The challenge of Artificial Intelligence solutions will be to ensure that the right data is seen by the right person. And, above all, that this viewing is exhaustive. This means a huge effort in terms of filtering and visuals and the necessary support from the managers involved.
• Relying on the cloud. Business Intelligence platforms will be the first to enjoy the benefits (processing, scalability and integration) of the cloud. Only by relying on these types of platforms, and their services, will it be possible to guarantee processing capacity that meets managers’ speed and accuracy requirements.

This therefore creates a “pro” level CFO, a manager who, supported by information processed in real time, is able to streamline processes and speed up decisions thanks to their technology skills and well-defined characteristics: 

• Favoring automation of very expensive operational activities that have been carried out manually to date. These include checks to guard against fraud, unusual and unjustified expenditure, etc.
• Minimizing the time between the data processing phase and this information being turned into concrete actions.
• Having a proactive role in the management control of the other divisions thanks to Artificial Intelligence and, more specifically, machine learning, algorithms.
• Having the same proactive role in the assessment of new technologies which can improve other divisions’ processes, in order to achieve the common goal of cost optimization.

Lutech is already working with various CFOs from major multinationals to help them improve their approach to Business Intelligence tools: selecting the best platform, consulting, continuous fine tuning and support on training are our steps to help companies to achieve their goals more effectively.

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