Research firm Analysys says that IBM’s acquisition
ofbusiness intelligenceand performance
management software supplier Cognos, following announcements by
Oracle and SAP that they would be buying specialist business
intelligence vendors, is evidence that specialist business
intelligence functionality is becoming more tightly integrated with
the traditional business operations of the enterprise.
The global adviser to telecoms, IT and media advises that this
should prompt firms to take the opportunity to evaluate more
widespread adoption of business intelligence functions within their
organisations.
Focusing on the telecoms industry, Analysys said that the
relatively late arrival of competition means that operators have
not tended to exploit the opportunities of business intelligence to
the same degree as organisations in other industries, such as
retail. “However this situation is now changing,” said Therese
Cory, Analysys Associate and author of a
report on the way telcos use business intelligence.
“The business intelligence function is becoming more tightly
integrated with the operations of the enterprise,” Cory continued.
“In the telecoms industry, operators are already standardising on a
single business intelligence product to reflect the increasing use
of business intelligence as an enterprise-wide strategic tool
controlled centrally rather than a disparate set of departmental
tools being utilised autonomously. Nonetheless, there should still
be room for creative and innovative uses of business intelligence
to solve problems in specialist areas of the business.”
Operators in developed markets are discovering innovative uses for
business intelligence because of a new urgency to extract more
intelligence out of their business and operational data, while
operators in developing markets are starting to explore how
business intelligence can provide competitive advantage as their
markets are liberalised.
What is more, Cory added, the way that business intelligence is
utilised is evolving from a reactive activity (performed by
specialist business analysts in isolation from operational staff in
other parts of the organisation) to a business activity that staff
across a range of functions and departments across a telco
organisation can perform in the course of their work.
It will likely be, Cory predicted, that operators will increasingly
demand a virtual view of information from both historic (formatted)
information in the data warehouse, and near real-time information
from the operator's live systems in order to assist in decision
making and service quality assurance.
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