2016 is the era of digitalisation, predictions and enterprise business intelligence using analytics to achieve a universal competitive advantage. Organising, integrating and governing your data allows your organisation to make strategic and informed decisions based on objective information rather than assumption.
Is your organisation's data accurate, have you got a business intelligence and analytics strategy, are you making the most of your data?
On this note, Adapt IT, partnering with ITWeb, is conducting an online Business IT Analytics survey during April to identify the appetite for business intelligence and analytics investments in South Africa.
"We're undertaking this survey to unlock some of the main reasons why business intelligence and analytics projects succeed or fail, and to better understand the customer's viewpoint regarding business intelligence and analytics," says Richard Msweli, Durban Executive: Operations at Adapt IT.
Furthermore, Msweli states that the overall view of the business intelligence and analytics landscape will help to realise where the ongoing efforts in this space are; and the rationale behind the business intelligence and analytics roadmap for most organisations.
"The survey results will therefore allow us to explore how to overcome these issues and actually create opportunities for successful business intelligence and analytics implementations. In addition to this, the results will provide useful information to use in improving our customer experiences," he adds.
Msweli points out that most business intelligence and analytics projects succeed or fail based on stakeholder buy-in and adoption. Additionally, he says that clarity and definition of project goals and objectives can have serious implications in how successfully a business intelligence and analytics project is procured and implemented.
"Furthermore, organisations need to acknowledge the maturity level and accept the effort, time and patience required to progress the Business Intelligence and Analytics investment roadmap through the appropriate level"
Business must adapt to benefit from big data
Msweli believes that business intelligence and analytics drives business decisions. He adds: "You do not want to be centering your decisions on 'unintelligent' data. It is critical to extract the appropriate value out of the data, and to drive informed decision-making. This not only allows for making faster and better decisions, in the short term, but to plan and strategise for future business development and objectives."
Msweli goes on to say that there are essentially three levels of business intelligence and analytics that complete the data discovery journey, i.e. descriptive, predictive and prescriptive.
Descriptive is the first level. "This looks back at what happened - essentially a hindsight review. In this phase we answer the question 'why things happened'."
Msweli says the second level, predictive, is about insight - identifying patterns and trends and identifying criteria that build predictive models to envisage or forecast future business behaviour.
"The third and last level is prescriptive, which aims to allocate resources optimally to take advantage of predicted trends and future opportunities. It is using the gathered intelligence as foresight to direct resources strategically to areas with the greatest potential for success," he adds.
Msweli points out that business intelligence and analytics is key to all organisational decision-making processes.
"It can help businesses make sense of and optimise the value obtained from all their available data. This ultimately supports a business's efforts in improving specific business outcomes and as a core component of all business decisions," he concludes.
Click here to complete the survey and you can win a Fitbit Blaze Watch GPS.
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