Johannesburg, 08 Jul 2004
Business intelligence (BI) solutions have, for some time, been seen as costly, complex and better suited to larger organisations. This is changing as the technology evolves and becomes increasingly suited to helping smaller businesses gain a competitive-edge over their rivals.
This is the view of Annette Hieber, marketing director of Bytes Business Solutions, a subsidiary of the BTG Group and member of the Altron Group of companies.
She says that today, thanks to a variety of enhancements, upgrades and new-generation developments, BI is available, for the first time, in the small to medium enterprise (SME) space as well.
"This is because BI has changed - not only in terms of pricing, but also in terms of performance and focus," she says. "The most significant change has come with the addition of predictive analytics to its platform.
"Predictive analytics, as a technology, represents a breakthrough for the IT industry. More specifically, it has presented BI users with a quantum leap forward in terms of decision-making ability."
Hieber says a positive implication for SMEs resulting from the BI, predictive analytics marriage - called BI-Analytics - is that the two technologies can be applied and integrated into business processes at every customer touch point, including face-to-face interaction, telephone, mail, e-mail, or the Web.
"The key advantage is that companies no longer have to have costly centralised data warehouses that are capable of cleansing, simplifying, enriching and localising data, to benefit from BI-Analytics.
"This plays into the hands of the smaller organisation, as a BI-Analytics solution is able to source and collate data from any number of sites and put key performance indicators at the immediate disposal of decision-makers - allowing them to make the business goals of proactive and predictive business management a reality," she says.
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