Business Intelligence Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Business Intelligence - Essay Example In this case, the Marshfield Clinic and the Exclusive Resorts, LLC case studies will be explored based on various elements of business intelligence. From these case studies, it is evident that there must be a drive or an instigating factor to pursue BI solutions, it is important to choose the right BI software, there are barriers to the adoption of business intelligence solutions, and the system must be able to integrate all the applications in the company. However, some of the BI solutions are complex and costly. Therefore, it is important for the business to perform enough research before settling on a final BI solution. The Marshfield Clinic Case Study The Marshfield Clinic has more than 50 regional locations with over 800 physicians and 6,500 healthcare and administrative workers. The clinic efficiently manages more than 375,000 patients each year. For example, the management team made an investment in electronic patient records. To facilitate it, the clinic offered its staff wit h electronic tablets for purposes of history taking which would be automatically populated in a centralized patient data warehouse. All the clinical care and financial information of each patient is safely kept, constantly updated, and ready for reporting and analysis. The clinic constantly innovates to be in line with the industry change (Cummens and Konitzer, 2011). Recently, the clinic utilized SAP Business Objects solutions to observe the quality metrics as it implemented enhancement initiatives. The clinic has an efficient system for collecting patient care information but it requires the appropriate analytics tool to improve patient care metrics and also provide user-friendly reporting for the physicians’ desktops in order to give support to real-time decision making. Initially, the clinic used sophisticated ad hoc query tools before acquiring SAP BusinessObjects for analytics and reporting, however, this method required the users to undergo extensive training. The clin ic utilized train-the-trainer approach to train the end-user. The SAP BusinessObjects was the best fit for the clinic. This is because the management team required software that non-IT individuals (particularly the doctors) could use without any problems (Cummens and Konitzer, 2011). The rolling out and adoption process was quick and smooth. However, there were challenges such as converting the 60 Cognos catalogs of the clinic into novel semantic layers that functioned with SAP BusinessObjects software. The whole process tool close to nine months and the software has enabled the clinic to meet its goals from the perspective of reporting and analytics (Cummens and Konitzer, 2011). There are a number of lessons to be learned from this case study. First, there must be a drive or an instigating factor to pursue business intelligence solutions. Though the clinic had an efficient system, it still needed software that will keep then up to date with the ongoing healthcare industry changes. Electrosmart Ltd (2011), states that drivers of BI include rapid change, governance, stakeholder demands, expanding on ERP (enterprise resource planning) and data availability. In the case of Marshfield Clinic, data was readily available and there was need to be in line with the health care industry. Second, it is important to choose the right BI