Today’s economic climate poses many challenges for
organisations. To stay one step ahead of the game, organisations
need the ability to make faster and better-informed
decisions.
Information lies at the heart of good decision-making and
organisations have turned to integration technologies and business
intelligence (BI) tools to help access and make sense of this
information.
Even though management has typically had access to
BI reporting and analysis tools, the rest of the organisation
has typically made decisions without access to all relevant data,
in some cases basing decisions on gut instinct, or worse
out-of-date information. However, BI is evolving and becoming more
pervasive throughout the organisation.
One interesting trend in the BI market is its role in the
development of enterprise information management (EIM), which
according to Gartner, can be defined as “an integrated discipline
for structuring, describing and governing information assets
(both structured and unstructured), to improve operational
efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight”.
Bearing this definition in mind, there are a number of key issues
and challenges facing organisations today.
On the way towards EIM, organisations need to first recognise
the strategic value of information by taking control of it and
using it more effectively inside the enterprise as well as with
suppliers, partners and customers. The first hurdle many
organisations face is data access to reliable and timely
information.
Businesses typically have data and important information in
different systems – billing information in ERP systems, customer
data in CRM systems or transactional systems, employee information
in HR systems. In fact, we estimate that most organisations
currently only access less than 20% of all their data and
information. Moreover, less than a tenth of all employees can
access that information. Clearly,
getting more
information to more people within the organisation is one of
the key concerns of any BI initiative.
For information workers, however, the processes by which data is
made available to them are typically invisible and take place
behind the scenes. For these users, it is of more importance that
they find what they are looking for; quickly and easily.
Accordingly, many organisations are reviewing enterprise search
technologies in order to let their users and information workers
find relevant information quickly. Using enterprise search
applications that access, categorise and display structured and
unstructured data greatly benefits organisations and leads to
increased operational efficiency.
There are clear benefits in being able to search for a name, a
product / product part or a fragment of an order number across
multiple systems and databases using an enterprise search
application that uses metadata to sort and categorise the results.
In fact, whether information is stored in data warehouses or data
marts, transactional systems or customer or product databases,
enterprise search is vital in retrieving and displaying it.
Finally, in order for organisations to achieve transparency and
allow business insight to as large a group of users as possible, it
is advisable to deploy business intelligence applications
throughout the organisation and at all levels.
Here in the UK, an example of how both BI and EIM have benefited
a business is Corus, a major steel manufacturer. Wanting to empower
users with timely, comprehensive information on customer-order and
steel-production processes drawn from SAP, a variety of mainframe
systems, and other disparate data sources, Corus deployed both BI
and integration tools.
A multitude of end-user reporting and analysis requirements are
satisfied by centralising reporting via an intranet using
purpose-built, value-driven data warehouses. The business benefit
of this approach is significantly increasing the
speed of analysis, enabling higher manufacturing yields and
faster response times for customer inquiries.
The traditional world of business intelligence has evolved over
the last few years. BI tools and applications were once being used
exclusively by management and business analysts. Now BI
applications are becoming more pervasive and in use across all
levels of the organisation and externally with suppliers and
customers. But it has not stopped there. Now it incorporates a
wider set of technologies to provide businesses with a strategic
framework to manage and use their information assets more
effectively. By combining integration and enterprise search with BI
applications, organisations can start to use all of their data to
make better decisions. That is the evolution of BI and the benefit
of EIM.
Peter Walker is managing director, UK, Information
Builders