"Business intelligence (BI) is often not part of the strategic considerations within IT and that thinking has to change if business is to get the information it needs to make progress," says Art Cooke, president of SAS International.
Cooke, who is in SA to meet representatives of large enterprise and government departments to discuss their plans to make intelligence ubiquitous, maintains most organisations in the world have fairly "scrappy" BI implementations.
"Organisations fail in their efforts to get information to the people who need it because they have either tried to achieve this using transactional relational databases or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that are ill-suited to the purpose," says Cooke.
Cooke believes organisations tend to be focused on standards and infrastructure instead of solving business problems because many in the IT community have backgrounds in transactional databases and consequently feel more comfortable with what they know.
"BI, analysis and reporting require an infrastructure that is optimised to handle data with a view to getting information from it as opposed to using it for transactions," says Cooke.
He attributes the success of SAS BI software to this alternative, non-transactional approach to handling data and recommends that IT departments consider intelligence at the same level of importance as the transactional work in an organisation.
"Having an optimised data storage structure enables us to load data, analyse and report much quicker than other players in the BI space."
Although Cooke says there is still much to be done in the way of showing organisations what is possible in terms of delivering useful BI, there is a definite trend away from the transactional approach.
"This trend is confirmed by the 15% growth that SAS recorded in 2004, but many organisations still need to be told they don't have to take 'no' for an answer from IT and that reports necessary for business decisions should take only days or weeks, not months," emphasises Cooke.
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