The need: fact-based decision-making in a rapidly changing technical & business landscape
 

As markets become increasingly competitive and achieving business goals becomes increasingly complex, the ability to react quickly and decisively with fact-based decisions is more critical than ever. IT has evolved into a true business enabler for the enterprise. Many organizations are using IT as a tool to help achieve their business goals and to drive success within the rapidly changing business landscape. Effective Data Warehouse (DW) and Business intelligence (BI) software are becoming the central drivers for accelerated enterprise performance. They are serving as the foundation for timely and fact-based decision-making processes. By integrating DW and BI “analytics” into key business processes and extending this business intelligence to communities of executives, line managers, partners, suppliers and even customers, organizations are creating more effective and “extended” enterprises. These successful enterprises have become both more efficient and more effective in using more accurate and timely information. That is the current landscape brought about by advances in IT. But as organizations continue to evolve, the complexity of the technologies and the volumes of data available to them can be overwhelming. Change is a constant. So, the demand for more and more timely and accurate data to support fact based decision making continues to increase.
 

The challenge: handling the complexities of large data volumes while satisfying an increasing demand for analytical tools
 

Today there is no shortage of data —raw data— to deal with in response to this demand for better and more timely analytics. Many organizations have been deluged with disparate data sources. They must devise processes and administration and governance tools for effectively organizing and handling it as they concurrently cope with the demand for more sophisticated IT tools to analyze the data and share it among a widely dispersed set of stakeholders. Moreover, data privacy and security considerations add to this complexity. Enterprises must capitalize on the opportunities presented to them with all of this data by effectively using Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence IT. Doing so will help them attain and maintain a competitive advantage and deliver on the promise of these technologies.

That is the value proposition ABSi offers: helping organizations deal with the opportunities and complexities of Data Warehousing and Business intelligence. Our aim, as a total Data Warehousing practice, is to address all of the capabilities needed – and challenges faced – in implementing our customer’s’ Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence programs.

Trends in the rapidly changing technical and business landscape point to the need for more integration of Business Intelligence applications with critical business processes and for more effective alignment of business activities’ performance with enterprise’s strategic objectives. 

We see some important trends unfolding in the marketplace: First, DW/BI systems are becoming more and more integrated with key organizational business processes. The analytics derived from these tools are being greatly leveraged to support the decision-making that goes on within core business processes. Concurrent with this trend is an extension of these analytics into an “expanded enterprise” of the organization’s partners, suppliers and customers – all using a common base of analytics, yet maintaining their individual privacy and security. Second, and greatly related to the previous trend, is the need for faster and faster turnaround of fact based analytics, often requiring a near real time data warehousing capability. This “speeding up” of the data transformation cycles within the data warehouse puts tremendous strain on IT organizations but, nonetheless, the competitive and complex nature of the marketplace requires the enterprise to respond with more and more timely information.

Finally, DW/BI systems are now becoming the central source for evaluating organizational performance, i.e., providing fact based feedback on how key enterprise organizations are doing relative to their business goals and strategies. In fact, the DW/BI systems are now not only are reporting in more depth about “what happened” (historical analysis) but also they are leveraging data warehouse data and BI tools to predict, “what will happen” (predictive analysis and data mining).

ABSi's DW/BI practice can help clients leverage these trends because we are an integral part of them, ourselves. We have the experience and the expertise to assist our clients in using DW/BI systems to gain competitive advantage.