20 June 2003
	Business intelligence HARD-WORKING INFO By Greg Gordon Executives want to make better use of the masses of data in their organisations

One of the fastest-growing sectors of the business software application market is business intelligence (BI) software. This reflects executives' desire to make better use of the data that sits on the computers in their organisations. According to industry research, the amount of data flowing into a company doubles every year. Much of it is superfluous, in the form of junk e-mail, but much is valuable business information that needs to be analysed and made available to management. Today, data is centralised in a single storage system at many businesses. On its own the data is worth little, but if it can be "interrogated" to establish business trends it becomes useful, essential even. That's the underlying premise of BI software. It trawls the masses of raw data sitting in an organisation's computer systems and extracts the information that paints an accurate picture of how a business is performing. It relies on historical data to show business performance, but some parameters can be set so it provides a predictive picture of how a business will perform in future. "BI is about the ability to access information, analyse it and share it," says Business Objects country manager Gary Lawrence. "The latest BI tools map the underlying data source or sources and turn it or them into valuable business information." An example of how BI is used is found in the retail industry. A supermarket chain is likely to carry thousands of items per store, spread around the country. Information about stock will be held on the chain's computers, but without BI software it's simply an inventory list. By applying BI technology to the existing data, some useful facts start to emerge. Executives can determine which items have sold well and where. They can identify good sellers by region and identify items that don't sell. They can plan their strategy based on this information. Lawrence says BI doesn't present the information in difficult-to-digest formats; it's easy to read and analyse. "Most BI applications display information through a dashboard. You can, for example, use a query panel to check sales by region or period. The system then generates a chart or report, depending on how it's been configured," he says. However, BI comes at a cost, and not simply monetarily, but logistically too. The data that exists in most organisations is on a diverse set of machines, usually a mix of old and new, sometimes with different operating systems. "It can be a challenge to collate the data on these different systems to form a unified view of the data," says Lawrence. Veritas SA MD Dave Reddy says for every R1 spent on storing data, R3 is spent on managing it. "Business applications rely on the data that resides within them. It's for this reason that data storage and management form a significant part of any BI deployment," he says. Lawrence says companies have spent the past decade or so setting up their data systems. "Most are now looking at getting value from existing investments and BI is a good example of that," he says.