Businesses Are Still Crazy for BI After All These Years
For the last four years, Gartner has surveyed thousands of CIOs from around the globe about their enterprise systems, and each year the top technology priority that those CIOs cite has been exactly the same: business intelligence (BI) applications.
Print
According to Gartner managing VP Ian Bertram, BI apps are considered "transformational" business systems. That's why BI has been the highest for priority for CIOs four years running, and why, he notes in a research report, BI "will fare better than many other technologies and management practices" during the global recession.
"BI is even more important when times are tough. It can help find bottlenecks and inefficiencies or to expose areas that are profitable," Bertram states. "The rapid growth in information generated from enterprise applications, the popularity of metrics-driven business initiatives and the growing need for regulatory compliance will also continue to drive growth in BI."
While I take no issue with Bertram's overall viewpoint or Gartner's survey data, I have to say that my take on the data is starkly different. Whereas the Gartner research may point to rising demand for BI apps, I see pent-up enterprise-wide frustration, aimed squarely at IT and CIOs for failing to give the business what it needs and deserves—for four straight years!
In my book, that's much too long a time to be asking for the same request and not getting it. Especially if you're the CEO or COO or CMO or supply chain chief or any other business user currently frustrated by the sham of a "business intelligence" system that you're currently forced to endure.
As I have reported previously, too many business users have given up on actually receiving an integrated and corporatewide BI, analytic and forecasting application set. Instead, many execs are relying on their gut to make critical business decisions.
The cause of this vexing business problem? Largely, it's the disconnected and expanding back-office mess residing inside IT's walls these days—siloed ERP and BI applications, standalone SaaS CRM apps, a couple of marketing department data warehouses, maybe even a legacy supply chain app, all working out-of-synch with each other.
A new Forrester Research report notes that right now companies and top executives must find any possible way to increase revenues. And creative IT and business users are now "leveraging BI as a corporate asset to continue to survive, compete and thrive."
Forrester analyst Boris Evelson offers a couple examples of ways in which actual Forrester clients are turning BI data into profit centers by "uncovering previously untapped revenue streams."
Here's one example: A large (and unnamed) global retailer is using its internal point-of-sale (POS) data to offer customer-buying data (for example, seasonal patterns, market basket, effect of promotions) to its partners, such as its suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.
"Raw POS data for their own products has always been available to manufacturers," Evelson writes, "but an analytical portal brings clear additional value, by not only providing insight into how your products are selling, but also what customers buy across product lines that may include your competitors." (The retailer has taken care of potential privacy and conflict-of-interest concerns by showing each manufacturer and supplier its own POS data at the lowest level of detail, he adds, but the data for competing products only at an aggregate level.)
Smart. Timely. Profitable.
How'd you like to be that CIO and IT staff right now?
Previous Post: NetSuite's SaaS ERP Story: After 10 Years, an Upstart Finally Turns a...Next Post: Want to Save $10 Million or More on ERP? Don't Buy Oracle or SAP
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
