Business Intelligence Visualization – A New Asset Lifecycle Management Strategy, Part I

Is your organization capable of identifying what it really spends in asset operations at a transactional level? Can you identify where specifically and geographically you may be out of compliance with your own key performance indicator (KPI) thresholds? To get a true enterprise view of your assets, you must go beyond basic business intelligence and dashboards to a new strategy for tracking performance – Business Intelligence Visualization.

A minimum requirement for a sound business intelligence management strategy is the capability of analyzing expenses on a line-item basis, drilling through aggregated or summary data to an individual transaction level. Business intelligence (without the visualization component) only presents summation data to reveal trends in performance and to make predictive analysis for future operations and their associated costs.

Business Intelligence Visualization provides a much higher level of utility and sophistication in the use of performance management information. In its most fundamental aspect, Business Intelligence Visualization can be understood as locational intelligence combined with dashboard-level reporting on key performance indicators, in which users are able to drill through basic scorecard reports to trend transaction level data at specific locations. True Business Intelligence Visualization not only answers the “what?” questions but also shows “where, why and by whom” to enable asset portfolio managers to determine corrective or mitigating measures quickly and reliably.

By combining various commercial technologies into a single view, Business Intelligence Visualization maximizes accuracy and utility in information. It provides a statistical and locational depiction of performance status and brings together all information components for confident decision-making across the asset portfolio enterprise.

With Business Intelligence Visualization, a portfolio manager can gain an understanding of which operational aspects are falling short of satisfactory compliance levels, and obtain specific visual information on the locations within the enterprise where performance is falling short.

This more holistic approach to asset lifecycle management provides greater confidence in decision-making. For example, at the constructed asset level, real property professionals may have very detailed information about mission support requirements, workforce demographics, asset condition and utilization, unfunded maintenance backlogs and other operational information. The summary of that data across the enterprise is typically (can be) displayed as a “dashboard,” where performance is depicted and key measurements are presented.

More specifically, categories such as energy costs, emergency reserve funds, lease costs, and time to process work orders from placement to satisfaction are all examples of data that can be presented to display the performance of assets and the workforce that supports operations. Trending data can enable more accurate budget projections and can identify potential shortfalls with sufficient time to adjust operational activities.

Commercial dashboard application software can enable asset portfolio managers to create recurring and customized reports from the aggregated available data. These dashboard applications can allow managers to set performance parameters for routine activities, enabling tracking of average performance results by operational category.

The shortcoming of many dashboard implementations, however, lies in relying exclusively on available and typically unfiltered or unverified data to portray portfolio performance. Dashboards in and of themselves have nothing to do with determining the most appropriate KPIs for an organization and determining if the available data for presentation is accurate for its purpose and is supported by underlying work processes.. A dashboard will only be as valuable as the compiled information set on which it is based. Portfolio managers must be able to say with certainty that the information lying under a dashboard is valid and accurate enough to project a meaningful result.

Through Business Intelligence Visualization, asset portfolio management professionals can combine multiple types of information into a single view, to show specifics about performance at precise locations. This goes to the true heart of business intelligence.

Let’s consider the benefits of Business Intelligence Visualization on the lifecycle management of a real property portfolio. Through this approach to understanding and analyzing performance data, an organization can realize the following benefits:

• Defining Real Property Performance Requirements or KPIs: Determining requirements for asset information databases, budget justifications, and asset management strategy
• Defining Real Property Asset Data: Determining what data is necessary to accurately and reliably support decisions, combined with those processes that are necessary to sustain a viable information resource
• Support for Key Management Decisions: Validation of asset repair, improvement, disposal or replacement requirements based on mission needs
• Request, Justification or Realignment of Budget: Tying operational support capability controls to auditable information; being able to prove measurable impacts of funding shortfalls
• Realignment of Property Inventory: Decision support for ensuring the continuous best use and utilization of assets to ensure mission fulfillment relative to cost
• Development of Asset Management Plans: Creation and sustainment of best practices for consistent decision support, compliance reporting and repeatable, accurate performance measurements

These operational areas can be directly improved through the application of a Business Intelligence Visualization capability. With the proper tools, combined with highly accurate data and sound decision support analysis, the improvement can be continuous, leading to improved asset portfolio performance that is compliant with evolving requirements of Federal management initiatives.

In Part II of this series, we’ll discuss the important role of locational data and GIS. Business Intelligence Visualization in total equates to knowing everything you need to about an asset, everywhere you care to know it. Stay tuned.