Research group, Aberdeen recently stated that enterprises on the path to knowledge-driven action are calling a new way of business - a pattern of intelligent, non-disruptive evolution. "Brute force is out; the lever of intelligence can now move mountains - even the bottom line," says Aberdeen.
This release takes a closer look at how companies can make BI work for them without having to compromise their business. It features insights and comments by Willie Bezuidenhout, business technologist: information management at Computer Associates Africa.
Today, there are a significant number of solution providers and enterprises that are trying to figure out why big business intelligence (BI) projects do not fulfil their initial - sometimes over-hyped - promises.
According to research group Aberdeen, the problem has generally been that the complexity and intricacy of the tools have made corporations take their eyes off the business.
"Enterprises that have been successful with analytics view its various technologies - eg portals, data warehouses, query and reporting, and sophisticated algorithms - as increments of intelligence that should be judicially applied various projects and aspects of the business," says Aberdeen.
This is why it is so important that companies approach their projects as intelligent business rather than mere business intelligence.
"Our perspective is that the BI paradigm must be turned on its head. Therefore, companies must implement technologies that bend to enterprises` business, rather than forcing the business to conform to the requirements of a specific tool," says Bezuidenhout.
Subsequently, companies such as CA have - after years of research - developed models such as the Intelligent Information Delivery Maturity Model (IDMM) in effort to put the intelligence back into BI.
The IDMM can be broken down into four levels. "It would probably be fair to say that many companies are at - or even below - Level 1 when it comes to their information management and delivery capabilities," he comments.
Level 1 represents the centralisation of access to data, or raw material. This includes both structured and unstructured data, database output/access, documents, spreadsheets, text files, PDFs, digital content and graphics.
The reality is - prior to Level 1 - organisations are at a point where they are "drowning" in data, wasting time accessing data, while feeling that they don`t know what`s going on with their own business.
Once organisations attain centralised access to data, they have a need for more access to, and use of objective, trustworthy and useable information - a move which Level 2 then facilitates.
Level 3 addresses issues such as delivering only relevant knowledge and applying patterns of personal experience to information.
Says Bezuidenhout: "An organisation that is able to deliver relevant information empowers its decision-makers with the right information. However, decisions are still made on a case-by-case basis, no matter how routine or how often the same conditions result in the same decision."
This is why it so important that companies eventually reach Level 4 of the IDMM, as it applies predictive and rules technologies to automate routine decisions, enabling executives to spend time handling exceptions and non-routine issues.
"Companies, therefore, need to keep an enterprise-wide focus while planning to deliver information to decision-makers, while at the same time determining the current maturity level of information in an organisation. Last, but probably the most important, enterprises must build on their successes in order to move to higher maturity levels," he says.
Delivering on the promise of the IDMM requires integrating a number of architectural and technical components and capabilities that can work together seamlessly.
Basically, organisations need to move from one maturity level to another without having to re-engineer components.
"Our CleverPath BI solution differentiates itself by the sheer number of technologies it underpins. CleverPath combines the repositories for file systems, content and metadata, search, data mining and various other well-known elements of BI with legacy integration mechanisms," comments Bezuidenhout.
Concludes Aberdeen: "View CA`s CleverPath as piece part of services that dynamically shift to give the most efficient answer to any question. In other words, CA has removed boundaries to the intelligent use of BI."
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