JSE-listed Abraxas Technologies has formed a Business Intelligence unit, to be headed up by local data warehousing expert Michelle Leslie. The new unit has been created, says Leslie, in response to customer demand and to an identified shortfall of appropriate skills in the marketplace."Many companies claim to have data warehouses, but a lack of understanding, along with vendor hype in the market, means some of these data warehouses have not delivered true business benefit."Building a data warehouse is not about ROLAP or hypercubes, it`s about producing management information that can be used to gain a competitive advantage. Implementing a data warehouse is a strategy for dealing with massive amounts of data; data that needs to be transformed into information by putting it into a business context and then making sure the right people have access to that information."Leslie`s business unit will help corporates to implement systems that provide management with the information they need to drive their business. "Our customers are the ultimate users of the data warehouse," Leslie adds, "and by continually measuring the actual worth of the information produced by the warehouse we can ensure the on-going business value of that information."Business users shouldn`t have to worry about how to articulate their information needs to their IT departments. They are responsible for the concepts and strategies that decide the future of their organisation. There`s a gap in the respective thought processes of the IT community and business users. Each group has its own buzzwords and we aim to fill that gap by acting as a bridge between the two."The new business unit is and will remain product-independent, not selling data warehouses per se, but rather "leveraging off a strong business network to implement for technology partners".The new business unit has already identified a number of business opportunities, Leslie says.Leslie is a B Com IS graduate from Pretoria University. She followed up this degree with an MBL through Unisa, qualifying with a dissertation on data warehousing in the South African market. She has been involved with data warehouse implementations at Edgars, Medicross, Sun Air and Specialty Stores.
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