Submitted by: Submitted by mayank2study
Views: 446
Words: 3997
Pages: 16
Category: Literature
Date Submitted: 06/17/2012 10:12 PM
Stijn Viaene, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School & K.U.Leuven
IT departments are under pressure to serve their enterprises by
professionalizing their business intelligence (BI) operation. Companies
can only be effective when their systematic and structured approach to
BI is linked into the business itself.
For the third year in a row, business intelligence
(BI) topped the list of technological
priorities in the 2008 Gartner Group CIO
survey. BI refers to a broad category of applications
and technologies for gathering, storing,
analyzing, and providing access to data that helps
business users make better decisions. The challenge
is to extract real intelligence from continuous
and massive data feeds without being overwhelmed
in the process. Clearly, there’s more to
this than just pushing and pulling around data. BI
offers a systematic, structured approach to tackling
this challenge from an enterprise perspective.
The term encompasses a value chain that includes
transforming data into information and reaching
out to decision makers with it in ways that serve
optimal use. Ultimately, companies only realize
business benefits at the end of this chain (see Figure
1).1
Author Thomas Davenport has argued that analytics
and BI have swapped the back room for the
boardroom.2 Organizations such as Wal-Mart,
Harrah’s, Marriott, and Capital One are claimed
to have built their business on their abilities to
gather, analyze, and act on data. Such organizations,
called analytics competitors, are raising the
bar for their competition. (See the “Related Work
in Business Intelligence” sidebar for additional
research.)
Executing on BI’s promise, however, is turning
out to be more challenging than expected for IT
departments. One of the hardest nuts to crack is
how to preserve and leverage the organization’s
sizeable investments in an enterprise-class tech-
Linking Business
Intelligence into
Your Business
28 IT Pro November/December 2008 P u b...