More organisations are fast becoming aware of the benefits gained from implementing and investing in sound business intelligence (BI) principles, which is followed by swift optimisation of their data warehouse/enterprise store capabilities.
"The business environment is leaving organisations with no choice but to look at BI data warehousing/enterprise stores if they want to remain competitive, efficient and relative today," says Itayi Mandonga, senior sales consulting manager at Oracle, commenting on the results of the ITWeb BI Survey, which ran online for 14 days in November and attracted 82 responses.
Half (50%) of respondents indicated that their organisations have integrated data warehouse/enterprise stores, while the other half did not.
Furthermore, 54.35% of organisations do not have plans in place to implement data warehousing/enterprise stores, while 45.65% do.
"Back to basics management consultant Peter Drucker said 'if you can't measure it, you can't manage it'," Mandonga comments. "Now, relate that to decision-making, or BI; if you don't know about it, you can't decide on it. There is a parallel that can be drawn here. Surely, if you don't know any better, the decisions you make could take you in any direction. It's great if you strike it lucky, but note that the probability of getting it wrong would also be very high. It becomes a chance game.
"Understandably, some businesses are too big not to run on chance, and the consequences could be dire. Think of how much data your organisation is generating or collecting on a daily basis; could you make use of that data? Used well, there is a lot of value that can be derived from company data and the opportunity cost of not having a data warehouse/enterprise store could be huge."
According to the survey, the most popular timeframe for an organisation to implement its planned data warehouse/enterprise store is 24 months.
It also emerged that the top three areas within organisations that rely on BI capabilities are operational (72.55%), finance (64.71%) and procurement (29.41%).
Mandonga says these areas are key in any organisation.
"Imagine running 'south bound' operations for a whole year because one does not have a compass of where one is going or how one is doing, hence no corrective action is taken in time to put the operations back on track," he says. "There is a lot of scrutiny on spend these days as companies tighten their purses for operational efficiencies; this affects all three of the above areas. Bad financial and procurement decisions could lead to huge financial leakages, at great cost to the organisation."
The survey also discovered that data visualisation is the most valuable BI capability, as noted by 57.32% of respondents. Integrated drilldown capabilities came in second, at 56.10%, followed by end-user experience, at 51.22%.
The majority of respondents (72.73%) said 'real-time' BI is important to their organisations, while 12.99% said it was not, and 14.29% were unsure.
Mandonga explains: "A data warehouse/enterprise store will not necessarily give real-time BI capabilities. Instead, this scoring should be viewed in light of the very strong reliance on BI capabilities in the three areas identified above. More and more organisations are seeing the need to tightly integrate BI capabilities in their business processes. Key BI vendors have been talking about this need for a while now and it is encouraging to see South African organisations beginning to embrace these capabilities. What this talks to is easy access to operational data, possibly combining in with warehouse data for decision-making.
"With technologies today, this could be achieved with minimum, if at all, negative impact on the operational/production systems. The findings could then be fed back into the business processes to complete the loop. This is key, as businesses want to be 'ahead' of events, to be proactive, or to take appropriate action in a timely manner. Data often exists right away, but the challenge is how to get the data into a usable form, with context, and with enough data to make decisions. Real-time BI seeks to address/reduce challenges of data/information latency."
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