Finding common cause
Jinfo Blog

4th January 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Anyone who thought that the continuing economic downturn might slow the pace of corporate decision making will have had that illusion shattered by a recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey which found that recession had actually quickened the process. But what might the future hold and how can information managers prepare for it? Executives polled by the EIU for its report, The Intelligent Enterprise: Creating a Culture of Speedy and Efficient Decision-Making, also countered the popular belief that the quicker decision making stemmed from flatter, more decentralised organisations. In fact, well over a third said that the process had become more centralised in the C-suite, with only 16% saying it had shifted to business units (http://digbig.com/5bawkp). Remove decision-making bottlenecks by simplifying corporate structures, help employees collate the quality of data they need, address issues of data governance and improve the quality of insights gleaned from customer service functions are some of the solutions the EIU offers. It also counsels encouraging the sharing of data across the organisation, so that decisions take full account of all the information a business has on a particular issue. It’s all music to the ears of astute information managers – and further evidence suggests that the frustrations they may experience at failing to make headway on any of this are shared by IT professionals. A recent poll conducted for the Register online newsletter (http://digbig.com/5bawkq) found many who understood the problem, and even had ideas on how to solve it, but were just not given the mandate and resources to deal with the challenge effectively. There's growing interest in ‘push’ delivery models, in which users are alerted to relevant information as key business events and exceptions occur, the IT pros told Register. But the strong dependency on ad hoc solutions and user DIY, with relatively little attention paid to architecture and the adoption of a more joined up approach, was ‘a recipe for fragmentation and inconsistency’. This matters for a business at any time – but especially when increased regulation and litigation loom. So it’s significant that, when all around businesses are retrenching, one area anticipating 23% revenue growth in 2010 is e-discovery – software to manage electronically stored information associated with legal and government proceedings. The forecast comes from IT consultant Gartner (http://digbig.com/5bawkr), which also believes that growing use of open source technology will allow business intelligence solutions to spread rapidly from more cost-conscious mid-sized companies and the public sector to much wider mainstream application (http://digbig.com/5bawks). There are many messages for information managers in all this – get involved with governance, make common cause with IT chiefs. But the fundamental one is not particularly new (see LiveWire items http://www.vivavip.com/go/e17539 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21429 for instance) – befriend the boss.

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