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Data tsunami makes for slippery customer info

Wednesday 14 March 2007 05:35

Snowballing data volumes are preventing datawarehousing and business intelligence (BI) tools from delivering the single view of the customer that firms so crave.

Three-quarters of 100 companies polled by PMP Research for The Evaluation Centre use datawarehousing. A similar number either use or plan to employ BI tools.

Yet despite this commitment, only 20% of respondents claim to have achieved their key desire to pin down that elusive single customer view. An alarming 45% of them feel they are nowhere near this goal as they struggle to cope with data quantity and quality.

E-business, compliance, company expansion and growing computer usage have caused a data tsunami. One in 10 of the respondents claim a 200% increase in data volumes over the last three years.

A third of the sample firms took more than a year to de-gunk the data sufficiently to use in a new warehouse.

But once the clean-up operation is complete, growing numbers of firms are pushing BI further into operational corners. An ambitious 16% of the firms are already using BI or corporate performance management tools to analyse data in real-time. Many are also rolling out BI capabilities to non-specialist managers.

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