Most SA companies have implemented business intelligence (BI) initiatives. The only difference is the degree of implementation.
BI is the technology designed to extract useful information about a company's performance, its products, clients, employees and competitors from previously untapped raw data resource pools.
The amount of information that pours into organisations of all sizes is growing exponentially and BI provides the means to organise it into information that's useful.
Oracle SA solutions executive Alastair Jacobs says that providing BI initiatives are driven with business goals in mind, they are fairly easy to implement.
"BI can be described as the pulse of a business. Using the information extracted from BI systems, executives get an audited snapshot of how their organisation is performing," he says.
"But BI is more than just a barometer of past performance - using complex forecasting algorithms, BI actually helps executives predict what business conditions lie ahead."
It's this soothsayer-like ability that first gave BI prominence when it went mainstream in the mid-1990s. Though many executives still view BI as esoteric, they are starting to take note of its possibilities, if only to cope with the flood of data entering organisations electronically.
Says Jacobs: "BI is a process that, once started in an organisation, never ends. The business environment is dynamic - it changes all the time, as does the intelligence required to run it effectively."
He says BI can take many forms - from spreadsheets and sophisticated graphics to messages delivered through mobile devices.
Altus Viljoen, a business technologist at Bytes Business Solutions, says BI is one of the most significant by-products of the e-commerce revolution, which focused on the integration of data and its widespread availability to all parties within a supply chain.
"Today BI technology is used to help decision-makers in business to reduce costs while making the best possible use of their resources. BI technology is used to examine business drivers from a variety of sources and predict trends based on the intelligent interpretation of the data associated with its findings," he says.
"In the process, hundreds, if not thousands, of inputs are processed from sources within and outside the business on a continual basis."
Viljoen says today's sophisticated BI solutions are able to find real business value for their users in terms of the creation of new business opportunities.
"For instance, the information gathered by medical insurance companies from medical claims has intrinsic value to other suppliers in the value chain. And details of airline passenger buying patterns and behaviour, gathered by airport companies, has value to airlines and related service organisations.
"Many examples exist where information is used to great effect. But there is one condition: BI data must be obtained correctly and packaged efficiently," he says.
Moreover, Viljoen adds, accurate decisions have to be supported by accurate data. "Historically, poor data quality has been a major stumbling block in the execution of BI solutions. Data quality has to be addressed in both transactional and operational environments in relation to time lines associated with its sourcing.
"With data volumes increasing exponentially, any company attempting to support BI technologies with manual systems will certainly fail. Because the nature of business is dynamic, almost as soon as reports based on manually gathered data are published they will be out of date.
"Effective BI solutions require tools to gain access to complex data and to keep pace with changing analysis specifications. Only in this way can BI add value and contribute meaningfully to the business challenge of beating off tough competitors and helping organisations to succeed in difficult markets."
Viljoen says organisations should measure data quality in terms of its validity, completeness, accuracy, currency and consistency and then implement a methodology, with appropriate controls, to eliminate gaps in the data flow.
"This is best achieved by standardising and aligning data across geographical and organisational boundaries," he says.
"Data quality can be described as the fitness scale' of an organisation. If it is clean - and healthy - it will sustain business in a productive way."
