Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 32 | Page 65

INDUSTRY WATCH THE ORGANISATION HAS TO BREAK THE PERCEPTION THAT DATA IS OVERWHELMING, UNTRUSTWORTHY, HARD TO INTERPRET AND DAUNTING. C ompanies are disappointed by the lack of clarity offered by business intelligence (BI) solutions and the lack of engagement with analytics tools from internal and external stakeholders. Many aren’t deriving the value or return on investment. The truth is that to truly engage with data and pull out the golden threads that allow it to fully deliver on its capabilities, the organisation must use the right tools and ask the right questions. Transcendent BI is defined by its ability to provide real-time, empirical data in a contextualised way aligned with real-world business requirements across all levels of the organisation. It is equally defined by how it is trusted, implemented and integrated into the business and embedded within a culture that is data literate. interpret the insights, so they understand what the data is telling them, but this is time consuming and prone to human error and delay. It is further complicated by the fact that many people are not data literate and feel that using BI platforms will force them to scale immeasurable learning curves. What’s needed is a solution that thinks for the user and directs their attention in the right areas. Access to data is easy. Access to real insight is more challenging. Users need to be able to ask powerful questions about trends and patterns not obvious to the business. The organisation has to break the perception that data is overwhelming, untrustworthy, hard to interpret Data is still the black gold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and it is still capable of driving the potential of business beyond what can be seen today and into new markets and innovation. To achieve this potential, there are many challenges that the organisation must overcome. The first is internal resistance. Many individuals are resistant to the analytics tools and platforms that claim to have a deeper view of the data than they do. Users want control over their data, they want to see the numbers and manually www.intelligentcio.com Trackmatic CEO David Slotow INTELLIGENTCIO 65