SA should develop the skills to become a global business intelligence centre in the same way that India did with call centres, ITWeb`s Business Intelligence Executive Forum heard this morning.
Skills shortage not unique to SA
[VIDEO]The shortage in business intelligence skills is not unique to SA, but is being felt globally as business intelligence has entered the mainstream, said SAS MD Bill Hoggarth.
Three forces are driving this uptake: the need for businesses to have competitive advantage, a complex regulatory environment and the maturing of enterprise resource planning, he said.
Demand for business intelligence is increasing, as is demand for skills as a result.
"We won`t get the skills from overseas - it`s a global shortage. In fact, SA is at the forefront of the wave," Hoggarth said.
The business intelligence community needed to be aggressive about learnership programmes and also had to cross-train - educate people whose skills were coming to the end of their lifecycle, he added.
"But let`s stop the cannibalisation of the business intelligence resources in the country," he said, adding that there was no need for industry players to poach people from each other, when they could educate ERP consultants whose projects are coming to a close.
Business sees information value
[VIDEO]Business today realises the value of information, Alastair Jacobs, Oracle SA`s solutions manager, told the conference.
However, he said business intelligence was also crucial for government to be able to improve service delivery to citizens, adding that changing legislation made reliable information more available and more critical to government departments than ever before.
"There are a lot of initiatives within the State IT Agency (SITA), but I think there`s a long way to go. There`s a lot of untapped information in government systems. It`s critical - the future of government is in information delivery."
However, he said government is moving in the right direction. One of SITA`s projects is a common data repository aimed at bringing together information from different departments into one accessible central information store.
"I think industry, the BI vendors and practitioners can play a huge role in assisting government with expertise and not just within a transaction-based interaction with government but more a consultative partnership in achieving those information goals."
Data quality key
[VIDEO]Estelle de Beer, practice manager at BIPractice, told the forum that ensuring data was of good quality was a crucial aspect of business intelligence.
She said there were six types of data quality issues, centring on completeness, conformity, consistency, duplication, integrity and accuracy.
Poor quality data was the biggest problem in customer relationship management, she said, citing research firm Gartner, adding that poor quality referred not just to the format of data, but also to other considerations.
Examples were data collected for one purpose now being used for other applications, data migration and consolidation errors, and the fact that 2% of customer data became obsolete within a month as a result of people moving, marrying, dying or changing jobs, among others.
Bad quality data could have several negative consequences, including the erosion of credibility with customers and suppliers, poor service, lost opportunities, and significant compliance issues from a legal perspective.
"Most companies are aware of the problem, but they underestimate the extent and cost of the problem and the value in fixing it. Everyone blames IT, but most data is created and used by people outside IT."
Part of the solution lay in first recognising the problem, determining its extent and educating everyone involved in defining and deploying systems.
One solution lay in automating data quality monitoring, which not only corrected bad quality data before it reached the target, but could also be shown to reduce costs significantly over manual data profiling.
The benefits included an improved bottom line and more effective management.
"Information should be considered as part of the company`s asset portfolio," she added.
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