Business intelligence - more collaboration needed
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Completely happy with your bank? Thought not. Part of the reason may be its lopsided deployment of the intelligence at its disposal, a condition afflicting many sectors, not just banking – and largely for non-technical reasons.

Profiling IBM’s information governance support activities in a recent article in Information World Review, author Graham Buck notes some initial questions that IBM advises organisations to ask themselves. And they’re certainly non-technical.

“Do we fully understand the information that we have?” suggests IBM’s Tony Hulme. How can we understand all the data? Can we trust it? Only a few organisations have fully mastered information governance, Hulme continues – and those that have will also have embraced the concept of flat-based decision making.

(Graham Buck’s article additionally reports, incidentally, that IBM has been on the information governance acquisition trail and has a war chest for more purchases – a development previously noted in LiveWire.)

Meanwhile the technology analyst Gartner takes up the same theme in its latest pronouncement on business intelligence (BI). Throughout 2012 and beyond, BI will remain subject to non-technical challenges, it says; the right level of autonomy is required to avoid the bottlenecks that over-centralised BI teams create, while simultaneously establishing enough consistency and standards for enterprise-wide BI adoption.

Fewer than 30% of BI initiatives will align their analytic metrics completely with enterprise business drivers by 2014, Gartner warns. IT leaders will need to concentrate not only on the technological aspects, but also on the severe lack of analytical skills.

Which brings us back to banks. If a new survey from consultant Freeform Dynamics is to be believed, they too aren’t making the most of their business intelligence, and for remarkably similar reasons.

Information Management in Financial Services: Data Deluge, Data Desert or Both? (registration required) is based on a survey of readers of the iconoclastic IT magazine The Register. It finds that, while firms in the sector are using BI effectively for regulatory and compliance purposes, they’ve neglected other key areas relating to customer acquisition and retention.

Among the afflictions they face is the problem of valuable data hidden in a deluge of less important or irrelevant information. In addition, over-dependence on individually created spreadsheets can result in the development of a plethora of mutually inaccessible models and forecasts producing conflicting – if not downright misleading – results.

Intriguingly, though, the answer again doesn’t seem to be centralisation pure and simple. Firms with good BI capability embrace local or individual empowerment to a much greater degree, have a more collaborative culture and are the least product-centric in the way they manage their business, the survey concludes.

Information governance, non-technical issues, collaborative culture. These all sound like buzzwords that information managers can relate to.

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