The modern business environment is characterised by continual change and increasing challenges to delivering growth and profit with enormous personal and institutional risk, but this environment also represents a tidal wave of opportunity for the business intelligence (BI) community.
This was the thrust of the opening address at this year's SAS customer and partner forum in Johannesburg this morning by Bill Hoggarth, MD of SAS SA.
"In the face of these challenges, it is the BI community that can provide new sources of differentiation," he said.
Hoggarth observed that many organisations had made huge investment in various systems for optimising operational efficiency. "These systems are capable of capturing an unprecedented amount of data that can be translated by the BI community into actionable intelligence."
Hoggarth said the business community looked forward to the future with relish because it was in a position to offer business a crucial source of sustainable competitive advantage. BI was also finally being recognised as an enterprise-wide asset, he noted.
"A single integrated version of the truth across the enterprise is necessary to maximise the benefit of intelligence, and this is something the BI community can offer business."
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