Posts Tagged Business Intelligence
Making Companies Smarter
Readers of my recent post “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” can find a great post to continue the thought at CIOZone: “Ask the CIO–Do you want more BI & a smarter company?”.
In her post, Lauren E. Bielski writes:
“Nobody wants a less capable organization if there’s a way around the usual trade-offs posed by budgets, time constraints, and the competition. Hence, more talk than ever these days about fact-based decision making— which is pretty revered in management—and more efforts around data mining in an effort to learn more about operations, customers, and winning tactics.”
Good observations. But, are companies getting anywhere with their efforts? Quoting from a recent Aberdeen research report:
“the creation, management, and continual review of key performance indicators can prove to be a difficult process, particularly when large, complex data volumes are combined with rapidly changing business dynamics.”
Yes, it is not easy to do. I would also suggest that asking the CIO to make the company ’smarter’ may not be the best approach.
Net-net, companies have to do a number of things with their culture, vision, approach and, above all, not leave the job to the IT department.
Business leaders will not be able to get away with the abdication of attention and support that has doomed many an ERP implementation. No, they “own” this one. IT will lend its helping hand, but CIOs should push back and push back hard.
The CIO will have enough challenges executing the enabling initiatives.
What do you think? Please offer your comments.
©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business?
As I started to develop this blog post, it occurred to me that my working title, “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” might have been previously used in some other publication. So, I Googled it.
I did find some very close variations, but not exactly in the form of the question that the title poses.
I was led to a white paper, “business intelligence is intelligent business”, by Gerry Davis, Regional Managing Partner, Asia-Pacific for Heidrick & Struggles. In the opening paragraph, the problem is summarized thusly:
“Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. Analyzing customer information for potential cross-sells, increased revenue streams, and improved service is more challenging. But getting the information to the front line in a timely manner and thus providing further competitive edge is proving increasingly difficult for many corporations.”
As we look at this statement, there are three main points: 1) collecting is “easy”; 2) analyzing is hard; and 3) disseminating it is very hard. Perhaps a bit oversimplified. But, in reality, most users will need this to be oversimplified to be able to overcome all their biases about IT, systems in general, any extra “work” that will automatically be assumed and fears about job security. This is said this way, not to be unkind, or even to be negative, but to make sure that the focus is on the right “problem”.
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