The South African Revenue Services (SARS) was crowned overall winner during the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit and Awards 2011, held this week at Vodaworld in Midrand.
This is the second year running that SARS claimed the award. Business intelligence (BI) projects were judged based on the most innovative use of BI tools and techniques to deliver business value.
The other finalists were BSi Steel, Murray and Roberts Steel and Credit Guarantee Insurance.
According to Bill Hoggarth, head of BI at CQS Technology Holdings, this year saw twice the number of entries in comparison to those submitted at last year's awards.
“This year's ITWeb BI Awards saw a lot more entries showing better BI functionality, data sources and business value,” said Hoggarth.
He added: “Vendors tend to put a lot of effort into traditional industries such as big banks, enterprise, retail and telcos... However, we are starting to see more BI value coming from other industries, such as manufacturing and mining.
“These awards were evident of that trend, where two of the finalists were steel companies.”
“Technology and architecture is improving. But the most successful BI implementations are those that educate the end-users prior, during and after the BI solution is delivered,” said De Beer.
Devlin said the BI project entries showed two qualities; driving business value and bringing information together to form a real solution to a problem.
“We also saw how smaller organisations received more value from BI than larger organisations, simply because they have clean data.”
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