Next-generation business intelligence (BI) is rapidly being accepted as a critical tool for business success.
The fast pace of developments in the ICT industry means that now, more than ever, enterprises are realising they need to rethink their strategies and adapt in order to achieve their goals, says Ayanda Dlamini, business development manager at LGR Telecommunications. Dlamini chatted to ITWeb last week about how enterprises should handle the BI boom.
"Businesses must be constantly aware of changing market forces and customer sentiments, and must be able to refocus and change direction accordingly. This level of business agility can only be informed by next-generation BI."
According to Dlamini, this requires a mindset change. "Your BI strategy should be in line with the business' main concerns, which are changing all the time." As such, said Dlamini, an organisation's BI platform should be built with enough flexibility and agility to change as the industry changes and as the business' needs change.
Today, the big data and social media waves mean businesses are facing huge volumes of unstructured data, said Dlamini, noting that next-generation BI and data analytics allows the business to examine this information and gain value from it, "BI creates structure from unstructured data, which can prove valuable for the enterprise."
Although he acknowledged that the initial investment in BI tools can be costly, he suggested that, by promoting overall efficiency, BI can function as a cost saver. "BI can be used to drive efficiency. Strategising and finding these opportunities should happen bit by bit and not all at once. With BI, the devil really is in the details."
Still talking trends in the market, he called on businesses and individuals to accept that the drive towards mobility is here to stay. "It is like a wave - it doesn't matter if you choose to ride with it or try to stand against it, you will be swept along with it." As a largely mobile continent, Africa has embraced this trend almost by mistake, he said.
Organisations should leverage these mobility, social media and big data trends, and having a sound BI strategy is a good way to do so.
"We have to divorce ourselves from believing that the way we did business yesterday should remain the norm," concluded Dlamini. "In this ever-changing environment, we can't use the same measures and techniques we used yesterday. Systems shouldn't limit business imagination."
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