by Angela Guess
Brian McKenna recently wrote in Computer Weekly, “Irrespective of whether a company wants to boost its customer service efforts, intensify the efficiency of its marketing activities, or increase its competitive edge – in a world in which the customer and customer demands are increasingly becoming the focal point of corporate strategic thinking, the ‘Three Rs’ of business success are crucial: the right information to the right person at the right time, as Forrester spells out in their current report, Maximize your chances of Business Intelligence success In a customer-centric world. To that end, software initiatives will have analysis and reporting tools like business intelligence (BI) right at the top of the agenda in the coming months.”
McKenna goes on, “But just how prepared are the present BI solutions for the challenges outlined above? According to TDWI, the adoption rate of traditional BI tools has languished at a rate below 25% for the past decade. The clear unwillingness of companies to actually implement and use BI systems is, in part, due to the fact that (1) even the specialists need several days just to generate a report, (2) the interfaces are too complex or technical for most end-users, (3) questions and queries need to follow a very specific pattern in order to deliver the desired results and answers, [and] (4) there are no self-service components.”
He adds, “The greatest challenge for traditional BI tools, though they may well be able to leverage structured information management, is the exponential growth of unstructured data – meaning all the data that is not conveniently packaged and ready for use in a data bank, but instead lies scattered and dormant in text documents, e-mails, PDFs, social media platforms, on websites, in audio or video files or one of the countless other formats which cannot easily be accessed for analysis or forecasts. This lack of access gives CEOs, sales and marketing managers an inadequate and limited view at best of markets, consumers and their needs. In other words, companies are in danger of flying blind, as it were, straight into tomorrow’s customer-centric world.”
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