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© iStockphoto. com / Henrik Jonsson
Business intelligence- it almost sounds like the punchline to a bad joke when you say it out loud. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the data rich environment today’ s corporations operate in, the capacity to understand what is happening around them is an important weapon. In the post-GFC world, where market volatility is still an everyday concern, the ability to an- |
exist- everything will just be data. Data from multiple sources, arriving faster with little or no discernable structure, will be the norm and not the exception.
“ Depending on your view of what big data represents, there’ s a layer of complexity on that that a lot of organisations are wrestling with,” says Mark Sands from QlikTech.“ Fundamentally, that comes back to a huge emphasis from the IT community, and vendors in particular, who are driving this,” he added.
Guy Harrison, from Dell Software, says,“ I think it’ s pretty clear that over the last five years, there was at least one big shift in the BI software market. That was the emergence of self-service BI, sometimes called agile BI.”
Before this, business intelligence and analytics were largely based around the
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lection, collation and analysis tools. Interestingly, Michael Pain, Accenture Australia’ s Analytics Lead, said,“ Return on investment that they’ re seeing, it’ s fair to say, is mixed. There are a range of reasons for that. One of them is the idea that a lot of organisations, when they invest in analytics, don’ t start with the right questions.”
This is a key. Business analytics require the business to have some idea of the outcome they are trying to achieve. Analysis for its own sake or because everyone else is doing it is not a good reason for investing.
Although it’ s important for businesses to have solid plans for deploying analytics and business intelligence tools, there needs to be a balance.“ In analytics, we believe a business case has to have a balance between clear and proven outcomes
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