Business Intelligence: The Great Underachiever

May 25, 2011 - PRLog -- More often than not, new threats and business opportunities are first identified by workers on the front line – customer services, sales people, buyers, marketing professionals - rather than the executives in the boardroom.

As businesses emerge from the recession the ability to identify quickly and react decisively to these changes is more important than ever. To enable this agility, reliable and timely data must be made available to the front line, where most business decisions are actually made. However, this is more easily said than done.

Business publication Computing, in association with Oracle, surveyed more than 200 senior IT professionals in large UK organisations. The results represent a “state of the nation” study of Business Intelligence (BI) in the enterprise: how it is used; who consumes it; where it is heading.

BI is as much a cultural issue as it is a technological one. It requires a clear vision from the board, and an understanding that important decisions are made across the business, not just on the top floor.

The overwhelming majority of IT decision makers (81%) appear to have bought into the vision, seeing BI as “information that everyone needs to make better decisions, and to do their jobs better”. However, this represents reality in only 24% of organisations. Put the other way around, 76% do not have a single version of the truth.

Why should this be? Why would so many businesses maintain discrete silos of data, restricting access to information to all but senior decision makers, while at the same time acknowledging that staff across the business require this same data in order to maximise their potential?

The key sticking points are security and confidentiality. Who can we trust with what information? How do we control who receives it? Are we compliant with regulations?

34% of organisations see the challenge of delivering only the right information to the right people as insurmountable, hence access is restriced to the privileged few. Another 11% are worried about securing the facilities where that data is stored.

These are valid concerns, but by failing to tackle them these firms may well be missing out on new opportunities. Asked how better BI might help their business, the top response was achieving more from the existing customer base, with insight into the performance of partners, suppliers, staff and sales offices also high on the list.

Failure to democratise business data inevitably leads to blind spots within the organisation. Many confess to operating with only a basic level of information about their own department’s performance. Eight per cent even admit to losing sales because of poor intelligence.

To avoid such knowledge gaps, quality information should be available as widely as possible, on the right platform, and to the right people, while keeping sensitive information locked down and secure. Only then can the organisation genuinely claim that it is operating with all the facts, with its workforce operating as a unified team behind a clear business strategy.

For many companies integrating BI solutions around new or existing ERP and CRM applications that sit atop a structured datawarehouse is the most sensible way of doing this. Roles that define a user's access to information can then be worked out across the board.

Read the report: http://www.ithound.com/abstract/business-intelligence-dem...

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