The real competition facing vendors in the SA business intelligence (BI) market is not another vendor, but good old-fashioned 'gut-feel'.
So says Bill Hoggarth, managing director of SAS Institute SA, the leader in business intelligence, who maintains that the challenge for BI vendors is to enhance intuitive decision-making with decisions that are based firmly on the facts and on the truths of predictive analytics, as well as human instinct and perception.
BI helps organisations to truly leverage the power of the vast volumes of information they collect on a daily basis. And these volumes are growing at an exponential rate. The University of California, Berkeley, has estimated more information will be generated over the next three years than was created in the previous 300 000 years.
"If operational reporting is all a company needs, then merely having data warehouses with appropriate amounts of data is fine," says Hoggarth. "Operational data is vital, especially today, when directors can go to jail for getting it wrong.
"The real value of BI, however, is not in reporting what happened yesterday but in predicting the future and answering questions that organisations had not even thought to ask."
The availability of a multi-facetted array of information from all the data-capturing channels that have opened up enables the BI processes to be much more accurate than in the past.
However, as volumes and BI imperatives increase, many infrastructure platforms are struggling to cope.
Hoggarth advises those considering investing in BI solutions to ensure that the platform they choose can support the vast volumes of data, text and voice they generate on a daily basis. It should also be able to collect data from any data source. Only then can the organisation exploit the full power of advanced analytics to gain insight about what will happen in the future.
"The intelligence platform is vital so that the real promise of data can be released through analytics," he says.
It is also important that the solution enables analytic outcomes to be fed back into the organisation's daily operations. The patterns uncovered by analytics should become embedded in operations, so that for example, financial institutions can prevent fraud, insurance companies can avoid customers whose policies will lapse, and utility companies can perform maintenance before high value equipment breaks down.
Organisations should look for a long-term BI plan as opposed to a quick fix.
"BI projects are never-ending," says Hoggarth. "As soon as they deliver the information the organisation needs today, the requirements will change. Enterprises should therefore look for vendors that can help them to plot a course for the long-term, while delivering short-term projects with good return on investment."
He also suggests partnering with a vendor who will share the risk with the organisation and accept value-based payments, thus spreading the investment over the time it takes to unleash the value of BI.
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