BI will rank as one of the top CIO concerns, as it concerns data, the organisation`s lifeblood.
It is a broad category of applications that gather, store, analyse and provide access to data that helps business users make better decisions. The applications include decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining.
As far back as 2001, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found: "Companies that manage their data as a strategic resource and invest in its quality are already pulling ahead in terms of reputation and profitability." It is a fact widely acknowledged today.
In technology terms, the five or six years that have passed since then can be equated to a previous life or at least a previous generation. But many businesses still fight an ongoing battle to maximise their data.
In October last year, another PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found: "Although many senior executives see potentially high value in the data in their company`s information systems, less than half say their organisation has been effective at converting it to usable knowledge. Major roadblocks include a limited ability to mine or interpret the data, competing corporate priorities and the lack of a clearly articulated data strategy."
But, according to the survey, 71% of senior executives believe their corporate data is potentially very valuable.
The terabyte concept emerged in the 90s as data marts and data warehouses entered mainstream technical vocabulary, and Telkom was one of the first local businesses to deploy a terabyte-size data warehouse. There is currently talk of terabyte-sized storage on desktop computers.
Many organisations now have databases so chock-full that they no longer face the question of where to get more data to mine but how to turn what they have into usable, and therefore valuable, information. With terms such as petabyte now entering corporate parlance, the problem is easily understood.
Compounding this issue is another term that has found a roosting spot in the corporate vocabulary: consolidation. Distributed databases are de rigueur with the proliferation of global organisations, mergers, acquisitions and branch offices. Simply being able to peek into all of the databases a company may possess requires a high-level BI acumen that few can lay claim to.
Single repository
Business users take issue when they cannot peek into the right data at the right time. Conflicting data only aggravates their distress. It is critical that businesses pool their data into a single repository and even then they must deal with a multitude of formats from Word files to .PDF files, e-mails, notes and spreadsheets. Enterprise content management is another emerging discipline.
According to the ECM Association: "Enterprise content management (ECM) is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organisation`s unstructured information, wherever that information exists."
And Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is correct when it states: "Recent trends in business and government indicate that ECM is becoming a core investment for organisations of all sizes, more immediately tied to organisational goals than in the past: increasingly more central to what an enterprise does, and how it accomplishes its mission."
The new corporate BI challenge is therefore not to develop a bigger data repository but to improve its data crunching techniques.
By Aubrey van Aswegen, MD of Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID)
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