We work primarily with mid-sized organizations and one thing that seems to ring true with all who are experiencing positive growth and expansion is the ‘mixed solution’ environments they eventually find themselves. By mixed solution environments I mean too many tools and not enough cohesion to the data. That is where Business Intelligence comes into play for organizations. By definition BI is a set of theories, methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes. In other words can you use what you have today inside your environment to help you better understand, run and grow your business?
It’s a similar story for most organization that start out small with less than 10 or so employees and quickly grow to 20, 30, or 100 workers. As you add more specialties and departments each one has different requirements. Finance, sales, engineering, development, partner relations, you name it there is a software application to help support those different teams. As you grow and add those teams so drags along those new applications until one day you may have 3, 4 even 5 different tools internally helping to run your business. The question is how do you get them all to ‘talk’ to each other?
In many cases what seems to be a cost savings or smart growth measure turns out to be a focus of consternation or high level of manual manipulation to cultivate even the least bit of usable data. The good news is there are way to help organizations intelligently hook these systems together to mine the data and being to create BI for useful purposes going forward. The other good news is there are great partners out there to ensure your foundation, architecture and methodologies work to provide you an edge for slicing through the minutia. Of course here is where you need to use PEI and our partners to help you map this type of solution and find your way to BI heaven.
Jennifer Smith, PEI
