It's good to talk
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Managers at all levels of all organisations are demanding greater access to information that enhances their decision-making. But getting business insight is about more than just technology.
The provision of business intelligence (BI) has become one of the top priorities for today’s IT department. And a glance at the delegate list at Information Age’s recent Business Intelligence 2006 conference suggests that managers at all levels and across all manner of organisations are demanding greater access to information that enhances their decision-making.
The conference, supported by BI software vendor Hyperion Solutions, was packed with a mix of IT professionals, business analysts, finance managers – even the odd CEO – drawn from a wide variety of industries, from travel and entertainment to law enforcement and investment banking.
Many of the driving forces for this broad appetite for BI were highlighted in the presentations, as experts from some of the leading UK BI users and technology providers shared their insights into such subjects as: creating a single, intelligible view of the business; the art of implementing performance management programmes; the use of powerful search tools alongside the analysis of structured data; and tips for washing dirty data.
There were plenty of tales of BI investments generating substantial returns and becoming a vital component of measuring effectiveness and benchmarking, but other factors emerged as driving forces for BI adoption – the pressure to meet regulatory obligations was one in particular.
But alongside the presentations, what made this Information Age reader event so compelling were the questions from the floor and the conversations at lunch and coffee breaks.
One of the delegates I spoke to explained that he had once been a BI-sceptic. His epiphany came when his son built a website for his band. To understand why some parts of the site proved most attractive to users, the prospective rock star ran some fairly simple web analytics software. The same principle is now being applied at that delegate’s company, with some impressive results: the number of online shopping baskets that are aborted at the checkout stage have been reduced by a third.
As the conference demonstrated, interaction with peers– as well as domain experts – can be a trigger for beneficial change.
Further reading
- Flexible pursuits - the current shape of software architectures and applications within the enterprise
- The new software landscape - enterprise software is increasingly capable of supporting business agility
