The team and I at Ventana Research through development of new research agendas for 2009 have identified business and technology thematic topics that will be critical to all organizations. These topics will be critical for business and IT to be more educated and savvy on how to leverage them for their organizations. These are our assertions and not just predictions for success in this year and we remain optimistic that business can drive significant change in how they use information and technology to advance their processes and people who operate them along with management who need better tools for being effective in their decisions.

Business Intelligence
It is no surprise that we wish that everyone in our organization had the technology to make them operate at highest levels of intelligence. Well that might mean that they are not human but computers but it is no surprise that having the right tools for providing information and analytics is essential for every individual. What type of intelligence am I speaking about? Well the type that uses information of any type from the data assets in your databases to the events from your systems and the proximity or location context from your operations. This all leads to what your organization is doing to enable true business intelligence (BI) that can support your organizations at all levels of the workforce.

BI has evolved to become a top priority for CIO’s, at least that is what they say according to many third party surveys, but we are still waiting to see how that translates into increased resources and budget to make it a reality. But IT spending effectiveness is a completely different issue that needs to be seriously addressed for alignment to business priorities like this one. Of course for many in IT they still need to understand that BI for those in business, especially business analysts who use spreadsheets epetitively and email as well as leading to the new forms of mobility with BI. Now to deliver BI, organizations have to engage to have the right management of information to support it with consistency and quality. Traditionally the focus on technology for BI has been centered on specific types of data, that from RDBMS under the enterprise applications or that in a data warehouse. Of course as organizations need to access many sources of data, the traditional cycles of putting all of your data in the data warehouse breaks down and many require access to data dynamically from many different sources.

Now as BI has matured into enterprise class technology, new forms of BI have evolved to address its limitations and other requirements of business and IT. One of the areas has been where the need to have real time information that flows from events, sometimes called complex event processing, in our systems and applications into where business and IT professional need to be more operationally aware or responsive. This focus on what I call Operational Intelligence provides new methods for business to infuse intelligence at the lowest operational level. This has become a place for competitive advantage for organizations that have invested into this new set of tools and information architectures and one that I have spoken about a lot.

In addition the context of information has become even just as important to many organizations where the location aspect using proximity or geographic can help guide effective decisions. The opportunity to process data from a spatial context or presenting information into graphic presentations such as geographic maps or diagrams is critical for improving efficiency and bottom line results. This form of Location Intelligence is not new but now becoming a key investment priority for organizations that are not just looking to innovate but provide the intelligence that is required for knowing what to do and where to focus efforts. These areas can be from where organizations focus on optimizing customer relationships, to efficiency of their manufacturing and supply chain, to the place of focus for marketing and sales organizations and many others.

All of these forms of intelligence are required for organizations to operate at the levels of performance that is expected by management. Without these tools the potential of people will not be met and the optimization of your business processes will suffer. If we focus our resources and investments into these forms of tool in a concerted strategy and effort we will find a greater ability for organizations to be more responsive.

 Are you satisfied with how you are infusing intelligence into your workforce through the right types of tools? If not, re-examine your strategy and build a business for improvement.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and  Twitter .

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research