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« Will Search Change the Way We BI? | Main | Semantics: What's the Deal With That? » September 18, 2007Competing on Analytics When There's Too Much Data
Tom Davenport coined the phrase in the title of his impressive book a couple of years back, and now everyone wants to do it: Compete on Analytics. It sounds so good -- but how close are we to this nirvana? That's a question I set out to answer in one of my latest articles in Database Trends & Applications, and it looks like there's plenty of movement in this direction. The challenge is that we've gone into overkill mode with the data we're gathering, and the technology to better help sort things out is still just arriving. Many companies are inundated with data, and are still mired in earlier generations of query and reporting products. As Eric Blankenburg, vice president of application and integration solutions at Avanade, told me, "Most organizations are barely at the toddler stage when it comes to analytics... We are drowning in information. It’s past the point where it is even possible for us to interpret the data and make reasoned decisions without some significant level of analytical support.” I also worked with Cognos, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), and Unisphere Research to assemble a survey of 296 data applications managers, who agreed with this prognosis: The study found that 91 percent of companies said that their decision-making capabilities were stymied by a lack of complete information. Yet, three out of four also report they suffer from ‘information overload.’ Identifying and separating out the pieces of data that have the most value may be like looking for a particular piece of straw in a haystack. Also, the majority of respondents to the OAUG survey report that it takes more than three to five days to get a report out of IT. Overall, the survey found, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to BI and corporate performance management tools. The key to successfully competing on analytics is embedding analytic functionality in every mission-critical application across the enterprise -- not treating BI and analytics as standalone applications run separately from the action. Marc Andrews, director of strategy and business development for unstructured information at IBM, told me that “Most companies are using BI for traditional querying and reporting, not for real-time operational business intelligence. They’re not using it as part of their business applications - as part of processing a claim, as part of helping a customer resolve a problem, or as part of processing a transaction.” This also places a greater urgency on data quality as well. Mary Crissey, analytics marketing manager at SAS Institute, said that many companies may rush too fast to rely on real-time or near real-time data without vetting it for accuracy or timeliness. But the bottom line is prices for sophisticated analytic tools and software is coming down, to the point where more companies can afford to compete on analytics, and thus be in a position to reap the benefits. But it's going to take time. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
