Growing Business Changes and IT Challenges
The management of business and operations in organizations is becoming more challenging and complex. Effectively managing and working with this complexity means IT organizations are called on to provide business-intelligence-related capabilities for understanding where and how value is created in the business, and responding more quickly to market changes and opportunities. These macro business changes are altering the way organizations view Information Technology including business intelligence, which will affect how they view and support an information management infrastructure. These business changes include:
- Multiple and interlinked strategies and metrics: Organizations are striving to link multiple strategies and metrics (innovation, customer creation, management, operational efficiency and effectiveness, and financial performance) to drive transformation.
- Ever-increasing rates of change: The speed of change and the occurrence of multiple business cycles, product development, delivery models and markets have increased the rate of evolution. With new partners, delivery models and markets (geographic and industry), businesses are constantly changing (sense and respond).
- Fragmented planning systems: The sophistication of planning systems has increased such that a myriad of solutions exists for all aspects of planning, from demand and supply chain planning to marketing planning and financial budgeting. These systems are being deployed tactically, which makes it difficult to understand the impact of different aspects of corporate activities on overall performance.
- Increased scrutiny: The compliance demands resulting from various regulations and other governance regulations mean that information and decision-making processes are subject to the same degree of scrutiny as transaction processing. Organizations are striving for greater transparency and balancing this against privacy and integrity demands.
- Consumerization of IT: Increasingly, users at all levels expect to have access to business, entertainment, government and personal information, similar to how they use tools such as Google to search the Web. This places increasing pressure on IT to respond more quickly to a growing demand from users for web-based solutions that are intuitive and easy to use.. IT organizations need to incorporate these user requirements and behaviors into their business intelligence strategies and governance policies concerning the use and access to information.