Information drives business optimisation

Businesses cannot ignore global competitors coming into the market, and have to make decisions quickly to survive in an increasingly complex environment.

This is according to Shane Radford, business development executive for Global Business Services. “An imperative has emerged for enterprises to aggressively pursue business analytics and optimise their businesses in order to address important and complex business opportunities.”

IBM held its Information-Led transformation conference in Sandton last week, showing how businesses can leverage information and analytics to drive business efficiency and gain new customers.

IT investment over the past 10 years has been focused on automating the business - ensuring that transactions flowed seamlessly across different applications without mutual intervention.

However, according to IBM, organisations have begun to focus on separating and managing key pieces of information that span across systems, and treating that information as a strategic asset to optimise their businesses.

Himanshu Desai, director of market management, IBM, said information management is at an inflection point: “From the 1980s it was all about applications to optimise business processes. Now it's about information players to establish an agenda in the company that focuses not only on applications but also information.”

Radford agreed with Desai, saying the challenge for organisations lies in forming the enterprise roadmap to drive information intelligence into day-to-day operations.

“Ultimately, businesses need to be precise about having the capability to source the right information and react quickly before the global melt-down happens or another business challenge arises.”

Despite the economic crisis, Radford noted that the South African market is still seeing good growth. He added that companies need to collaborate and change their business processes to become streamlined for optimisation and share information across silos.

Radford said half of organisations are pursuing business analytics optimisation, although 80% of that data is unstructured.

“If we don't start with the building blocks to manage unstructured data, than we don't have the capabilities to understand the information and to get to the business analytics and optimisation strategy,” he concluded.