Business Intelligence needs standardisation

Despite the wide recognition of the importance of business intelligence (BI) technology to decision making, few organisations are extending the value proposition of BI beyond the confines of power users and departmental BI experts, says Cisco World Magazine

According to the article, BI solutions are still typically acquired on an ad hoc basis, resulting in organisations using an ever-increasing number of unconnected BI products and consequently lacking information continuity.

The article concludes there is a need for standardisation, consolidation, and regulation if BI technology is to become a serious source of mainstream information and used more extensively across enterprise organisations.

Trek to the summit

00Days

:

00Hrs

:

00Min

:

00Sec

Businesses are suffering immeasurable losses because of their inability to exploit data assets effectively, according to a report by Research and Markets.

The research and marketing company report says many financial services organisations have started data warehousing projects, only to end up with partially integrated point solutions acting as little more than a data dumping ground.

The report says although the general BI market and the underlying technologies and architectures are maturing, the way that the tools are being used within organisations is far from mature.

However, Research and Markets says this appears set to change because the financial services industry is being forced to undergo sweeping changes in the wake of corporate scandals such as those at Enron, WorldCom and Parmalat.

The report concludes this has obvious implications for data quality and staff training as well as requiring that BI becomes integrated with business processes.

The Jollibee fast food group in the Philippines has announced that it is to focus on business intelligence.

Jollibee says about 90% of the company`s systems are running on Oracle`s E-Business Suite integrated applications and technology platform.

The company says the BI layer of the E-Business Suite is expected to improve the group`s inventory planning and overall information management capability.