Business Intelligence: Addressing CIO’s Top Concerns in 2011
Posted on Fri, Oct 28, 2011
It’s getting harder and harder to imagine the world before technology brought us many of the innovations we all take for granted these days. The joy of driving to appointments in cities you were not familiar with using only handwritten directions and a paper map possibly printed years earlier. Waiting for your monthly bank statement to come so that with a calculator and pencil you could balance your checkbook. Getting a weather report maybe once a day on the evening news. Oh, the memories!
To our advantage, technology has increased the speed at which we are able to receive important information about our current situation. Today we are able to “Google” pretty much anything we want and have instant results.
The Society for Information Management (SIM) recently released their annual CIO Survey which revealed that “IT & Business Alignment” and “Business Agility & Speed to Market” were CIO’s Top IT Concerns for 2011. Basically, CIO’s are charged with understanding the business intimately and then bringing the advancements we take for granted in our everyday life to the ranks of business executives and line workers they are supporting. So how does Business Intelligence (BI) fit into this situation?
According to SIM’s survey, BI topped the list of top budget areas of focus for CIOs - 50% higher than all other areas.
The reason BI continues to be such an important investment for CIO’s is that a world-class BI implementation helps them to meet both of the top two concerns - IT & Business Alignment and Business Agility & Speed to Market.
In the “early days,” BI was printing out reports of sales transactions and hoping that someone could figure out how things were going with the business, similar to reading a map printed perhaps long ago. Who knows if things have changed in the time since the map or report were generated. As our expectations for obtaining information about our current situation has increased with the adoption of consumer-related technology, so has the expectation that a business executive has at their fingertips (literally) all of the needed facts and figures important to assess, and chart the course for the business. A BI implementation needs to have resources that are deeply embedded into the business in order to correctly provide not only the correct type of information for the business, but also the appropriate delivery method for information.
As each new innovation in consumer technology increases, so too will our connectedness and access to real-time data. We should also expect to see additional BI investment which allows the business to respond more quickly and with more agility to the rapidly changing markets we face today. BI provides the situational awareness to business executives to which they have become accustomed in everyday.