Polish your antennae
Jinfo Blog

11th October 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Information professionals aren’t usually hired – or qualified – to assess risk or interpret business intelligence. But we are paid to have sensitive antennae – and in this respect, hindsight is a wonderful thing. As representatives of local authorities and charities caught up in the Icelandic banking crisis queue up to tell the media that they were only acting on the advice of the experts, the credit ratings agencies actually come out of this reasonably well. FT reports (registration required) show that there were warnings of the imbalance between the size of outstanding bank loans and Iceland’s gross domestic product http://digbig.com/4xqys as long ago as March 2006. Spring of this year did find the agencies referring to a systemic banking crisis in Iceland as a ‘low probability’ http://digbig.com/4xqyt – but events have moved fast and far since then, and it was actually early April http://digbig.com/4xqyw that Fitch and Standard & Poors cut Iceland’s sovereign credit rating to ‘negative’. It’s an interesting context in which to consider two recent reports that could have an impact on the way information professionals will need to work in the future – one on business intelligence from Gartner, and another on risk assessment from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Gartner’s report, Succeed With Business Intelligence by Avoiding Nine Fatal Flaws, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=774912 paints a picture of IT developing BI from a technical perspective, instead of adopting a business rationale for it, and of individual users playing with the resulting figures on their own spreadsheets. ‘Many organisations end up creating siloed BI implementations that perpetuate the disparate definitions of their current systems,’ Gartner reports; instead, they should seek business sponsors within the organisation who believe in a transparent fact-based approach, can cut through political barriers and change culture. And with unregulated capitalism’s reputation in tatters following the global banking collapse, the EIU’s report From Burden to Benefit: Making the Most of Regulatory Risk Management http://digbig.com/4xqyr (registration required for full free report) is certainly timely. With strong board level support, a key initiative for companies over the next three years is the formalisation and documentation of compliance processes – allowing the effective management of multiple compliance projects and minimising duplication of effort across different regulatory environments. Getting it right pays dividends. ‘Effective compliance can serve as a “gold stamp” to attract and reassure customers and investors,’ the EIU report finds – a valuable benefit in these troubled times. All these activities sound as if they offer core business opportunities for information managers. Regulatory compliance, interpretation of business intelligence and assessment of credit risk may be for the experts in their respective fields – but it’s we who should be able to manage the processes, detect patterns in the intelligence we receive and give the experts due warning.

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