“Sixty-four percent of CIOs believe that management is not using the right information to run business and all of them have business intelligence (BI) as their top priority,” said Ian Bertram, Managing Vice-President, Business Intelligence Research, Gartner kicking off the second day. He commenced his session on ‘Business Intelligence and Performance Management Scenario’ with this remark and went on to present findings from the Gartner EXP CIO report, ‘Creating Enterprise Leverage: The 2007 CIO Agenda’, where responses of more than 1,400 CIOs were considered whose annual IT budgets averaged $90 million. According to the report, only 36 percent of respondents believed that the management was using the right information to run its business. Business intelligence, according to Bertram, is an umbrella term. He pointed out, “CIOs still believe that BI is about reports and queries, but today it is a much broader term. It encompasses application development, infrastructure, platforms, tools and best practices. BI enables the analysis of information in order to optimize decisions and performance.” According to strategic planning assumptions, by 2012, BI will become a core business competency and applications will be pervasive driving business transformations from the strategic to the process level. He reminded CIOs that top performing organizations are analyzing and using information far beyond financial data to optimize their decisions and drive performance. Business dynamics has changed radically due to globalization, increased scrutiny, focus on new innovation/initiatives, rapid and interlocking business strategies and processes. Along with this, worker dynamics are also changing. “Today we control the enterprise but in the future, people are going to expect more and their demands will change. You need to start thinking about how your people can access information the way they want to from anywhere in the near future,” said Bertram. BI is linked to achieving business goals and its capabilities will become more pervasive in operational and workplace applications as organizations seek to use it to lead, support decisions, measure, manage and optimize their businesses and drive its transformation. Organizations need to prepare for needed changes in technology and products. More importantly, it will be necessary to change the way in which the information architecture and application portfolio is implemented and managed. Bertram explained the business strategy and performance management layers of BI. According to him, the strategy level is where the strategy, objectives and corporate budgets are defined. As with any IT investment, the degree to which your BI investments support your organization’s strategic goals and objectives will determine the business impact, acceptance and ultimate success of the effort. “At the performance management level, one defines how the BI and performance management program objectives and deliverables link to your overall business strategy and support the value-creating processes associated with the strategy. The business value of doing this right is the alignment of multiple business processes with strategic business objectives,” explains Bertram. He went on to explain some technologies to watch out for in coming years, out of which he stressed on BI, which will be significant in the near future. According to Bertram, market dynamics indicate that in the future there will be increased vendor competition and consolidation, and software as a service needs to be watched. Concluding the presentation, Bertram told the CIOs to strategize their business, plan for it as well as track technologies and vendor strategies. - (Express omputer, 24 Sep 07)
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