Only organisations concerned about one, very specific operational risk, such as money laundering, can afford to invest in a niche business intelligence (BI) product. Businesses with broader vision must think beyond niche products.
"Investing in a best-of-breed anti-money laundering (AML) product, for example, is fine - if that is where your vision stops," says Kerry Evans, general manager: Financial Services at SAS Institute SA, leaders in business intelligence. "However, those with bigger vision would do better to invest in solutions that can expand to address the entire risk spectrum."
Money laundering is just one example of the risks facing large organisations. Another is fraud, yet fraud itself is merely one of a number of areas enterprises must focus on in terms of operational risk. Others include financial management, human resources, physical security and IT management.
"Organisations trying to mitigate against operational risk should not choose a number of different niche vendors, but should rather partner with one stable vendor who can offer tried and tested solutions across all risk areas," says Evans.
The crux of any risk management strategy is extraction of high quality data from a number of different source systems. Once it has been tested for quality, the data must be taken to a staging area, such as a data mart, from where it can be analysed, and the results disseminated.
"This chain of processes, which SAS calls the Intelligence Value Chain, is key to any business intelligence strategy," says Evans. "An enterprise could invest in best-of-breed niche products in each of these areas, for example, data extraction or data cleansing. SAS's solutions, however, are ranked within the top three in each of these key areas by leading analysts and research organisations, making it more sensible to go end-to-end SAS. Organisations thus benefit from best-of-breed as well as a holistic solution.
"With one solutions provider, organisations also alleviate integration, version differences and support risks," says Evans.
A common metadata layer should span the entire business intelligence platform. Metadata enables an organisation to trace back, audit or repeat any transaction. The SAS 9 metadata framework delivers the power to integrate, share, centrally manage and leverage metadata - including information about data sources, content, business rules and access authorisation - across the entire intelligence value chain.
"Compliance legislation now requires financial and other institutions to keep terabytes of information about their customers for a number of years," says Evans. "This makes the need for a scalable, robust infrastructure even greater. Other vital issues to consider are integration, interoperability and manageability."
SAS enables businesses to tackle major legislation, such as Basel II, in bite-sized pieces. Thus, SAS can be introduced according to a strategic three- to five-year plan for companies with strategic vision.
"Customers are also assured of continued local support from SAS, as well as skills. Several SA tertiary institutions are now training students on SAS technology. SAS is the best company to support any organisation wanting a business intelligence platform, that includes compliance with Basel II or AML regulations," concludes Evans.
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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