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.

Market Intelligence
The priority to improve decision making in every organization is a topic to be taken more seriously. But it is not just that you are doing to equip your people with the right tools and not just spreadsheets to work in a collaborative manner across the enterprise or improving your processes. It is the full range of information that is necessary to understand the situation to optimize business decisions. The need for external information to drive market intelligence to you decision makers could make the difference between profitability or losses, as well as declining financial performance that should be considered.

This market information could range from pricing and supplier information on the commodities and materials that are critical to your products and services for timely delivery and profitability. It could also be competitive information about the pricing of services that can be found from online sources like product catalogues or purchasing sites like found from QL2. In other cases the information could be from real time networks of financial information from Reuters or SEC in the form of documents or XBRL feeds. For consumer product and retail information it could be market analytics about share and volume of products and categories to the impact of advertising to purchasing from sources like IRI, Nielsen, or influence of Internet activity market information from Comscore.

In addition have comparative industry benchmarks about the effectiveness of your business processes and organizational effectiveness of BI and performance management across line of business and IT like what Ventana Research and others deliver. No matter what business process or focus you have, you can find market information that can provide you an increased level of intelligence and is a critical component of your information management strategy. As you begin to take business planning to the next level and integrate across your enterprise, focus on bringing market information into your system to further enhance your business efforts. In addition to planning the role of the information can be essential to the analytics you need to determine how to operate more effectively.

How good is your market intelligence? Are you doing what is needed to not just access but integrate market information into your decision-making systems and processes?

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

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research