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« To 'Compete on Analytics,' Intelligence Has to be Shared | Main | BI Gut Check: What Decision Makers Really Want » July 12, 2007'Compete on Analytics'? Still a Dream, Say Some
Actionable analytics? We're still spending too much time gathering information, and not enough time truly analyzing it. Andy Bailey, vice president of worldwide marketing for Attunity, recently shared with me his thoughts on the 'Competing on Analytics.' vision everyone seems to be talking about these days. Is it any closer to reality in today's enterprises, or still a vision? Andy says we've made some progress, but, alas, the vision of competing on analytics is still elusive for many companies. Why is it so elusive? Andy points to research Attunity commissioned earlier this year, which shows the vision to still be elusive. "While there was agreement of its importance in creating a sustainable advantage, the reality is that management, and more importantly senior management, spends too much of their time gathering and collating information versus analyzing it and making timely decisions." Unfortunately, the current BI/analytics tools market is not delivering the kind of abilities decision makers need. Vendors typically "have focused on driving efficiencies in organizations by automating the repetitive tasks – gathering information for reports, distributing reports, creating charts and graphs and analyzing trends. While those efforts have been significant and clearly efficiencies have been achieved, the benefit to senior management has remained limited." Andy also points out that decision-makers still face a dearth of information in enterprises suffering from information overload. Many of today's BI solutions, in fact, "have only exacerbated the amount of information that is bombarding senior management and left it up to them to decipher, collate and try to find the nuggets of useful and relevant information for their particular responsibility." Andy goes on to note that "management does not receive what they need in context of what they care about and are responsible for. They receive reports and dashboards and can view portals, but they need to toggle back and forth between multiple applications, go to meetings, sift through emails, try to find documents and take one column off a report on page 35 of the report to make their decision." Overwhelming at best, he opines. "The burden has been placed on the top employees of an organization who were hired to drive a company forward, to sort through and figure out what they need. Sometimes one wonders if working more on gut feel back in the good ol’ days was easier and more effective." Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
