The 2nd Strategic Technology for 2009 according to Gartner’s David Cearley is Business Intelligence. And as stated by the well known title above this blog there is always the risk of trusting too much on your history while making decisions for the future. We’ve seen in the past that ’these mirrors’ have improved already. There has been significant reduction in ‘history’ in the business intelligence and actual information – it has become more real time. That has direct impact on smartness of decisions and on positive impact of the companies business performance.
No need to convince ourselves that data really brings value in BI! Still we see BI projects struggling with the foundation. The obvious statements as “garbage in is garbage out”, can we really trust the actual figures generated from our BI tool, and did the change management investments on the people providing the data really convert them in ‘data friendly persons’. I still need to smile internally if people complain about the garbage quality of the other departments and are completely convinced of their clean data - challenge them to cleanse and dedup their outlook contacts!
Another pitfall related to data quality is that people trust too often on keys or IDs. I’m sorry but data quality is much more than matching on keys or IDs, even on official keys like social security numbers.
A recent blog from Oracle’s Frank Buytendijk “The Crisis Was Caused By ‘Performance Management’, And Performance Management Will Have To Solve It Too.” brings this whole strategic technology in the right after ‘crisis dip’ perspective. How come that with all these new BI tools we didn’t see a economic crisis popping up in our windscreen, or were we too much focused on the rear mirror. Hope to read soon more from his analysis!