"Successful South African companies tend to have managers who know what they want to achieve and are empowered by company leadership to take the initiative to seek out and implement the technologies that offer the best business value," says Itayi Mandonga, Oracle business intelligence and warehouse sales consultant.
"There is a lot of knowledge about what technology has to offer and what solutions have been successful in delivering business value that can be gained by attending international vendor-independent conferences, exploring the Internet and consulting independent user groups."
Mandonga says independence from vendors for leadership and direction is what separates the successful front-runners from the less successful technology laggards.
"I am not demeaning what vendors can do to help business, but in my experience vendor assistance is a lot more valuable in cases where companies know exactly what they want to achieve and where they want to go," Mandonga explains.
Many South African companies tend to wait for success to be proven elsewhere before deciding to adopt new technologies, but Mandoga says those companies that have the freedom to learn what is possible, have been able to leapfrog ahead of their US and European counterparts.
[VIDEO]Mandonga says while local companies generally have a good understanding of concepts like data warehousing, there are still some that need education, particularly about regarding data as a company asset that is to be shared and does not belong to any single department or individual.
"Some companies will tell you they have a data warehouse, whereas in reality all they have is a data dump because their data systems are incapable of supporting any form of sharing, analysis or reporting, which are three key components of successful data warehousing."
Another common pitfall regarding data warehousing is that solutions tend to be implemented reactively instead of proactively. Mandonga says successful data warehousing requires proper understanding of business needs and goals as well as careful planning with the bigger picture in mind to ensure a flexible, sustainable and scalable solution.
"Oracle`s approach to any request for any data warehousing solution is to make sure the business understands what it is trying to achieve and to analyse the company`s needs and resources before determining what kind of a data warehousing solution is appropriate, if any," says Mandonga.
"Smaller companies may require only a data mart initially, but even this must be designed with the bigger picture in mind, providing for future growth and avoiding historical mistakes of putting data into separate silos that are inaccessible to the enterprise as a whole," he explains.
"At Oracle, we believe data consolidation should be the goal for any organisation to deliver maximum business value."
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