Business Intelligence - the Real Challenge

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Business Intelligence- the real challenge

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Technology/Business-Intelligence-Challenge-532622/1/

Parkinson, J. (2010, 3 2). Business Intelligence: The Real Challenge. Retrieved 6 13, 2010, from CIO Insight: http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Technology/Business-Intelligence-Challenge-532622/1/

This article talks about the Business Intelligence challenges that CIOs today deal with in day-to-day business.

The term Business Intelligence (BI) would imply the "intelligence" that "business" can create and use with help from tools and technology orchestrated by the IT team. BI is essentially helping enterprises to conduct business intelligently. If we look at the scenario today, BI has touched the heart of the business process in verticals such as BFSI, telecom, IT/ ITeS, and manufacturing. Large businesses in the manufacturing, government and pharmaceuticals are investing heavily in BI because a lot of data generated through their legacy systems needs to be used to take important strategic growth decisions. In the article, the author argues that BI gives business users the power to define and generate reports to managers with an intuitive and user friendly interface. Organizations can plan, execute secured data and do not have to rely on the spreadsheet numbers. Therefore, they are able to take business critical decisions more effective, and, thus, make their customers and stakeholders happier.

The author, on another side, points out some obstacles in executing BI within organizations. As the article indicates, one of the major challenges that an organization faces is to get 'clean' data. Efforts to gather such intelligence are hampered by inconsistency among data sources, problems with data quality, and a lack of clarity about how to take the knowledge gleaned from BI initiatives and turn it into practical and positive changes. Another challenge mentioned by the author is about BI's dimensions. I agree with some points of the author which supports for this issue. One of those is technology, getting the proper hardware and software. Human capital and culture is another. A lot of times you find BI applications are used by a small group of people. That could be due to a lack of standards in the applications and in the technology used. Another dimension is infrastructure. Is the infrastructure correct to support the application? You'll find sometimes a level of disappointment because of slow response times. The server isn't correct or the hardware hasn't been optimized. That can lead to a certain level of disappointment and disillusionment.

In my opinion, BI today is more challenging because users' needs change so quickly whereas enterprise resource planning