A Corporate Guide to Better Decisions through IT.

Seeing the Big Picture: A Corporate
Guide to Better Decisions through ITSeeing the Big Picture: A Corporate Guide to Better Decisions through IT
Executives at small and midsize companies are making critical business decisions every day based on the information available to them. This information can come from a variety of sources: opinions from peers and colleagues; a personal sense of intuition or business judgment; or data derived internally or externally to the organization. This is particularly "Nine out of worrisome given the lack of confidence in data available to decision makers: a 2007 report conducted by the Economist ten corporate Intelligence Unit (EIU) and commissioned by Business Objects found that nine out of ten corporate executives admit to executives admit 1making important decisions on the basis of inadequate information. This suggests that problems in decision-making to making important are arising in the quality, amount, and timeliness of information. As a result, today's small and midsize companies are decisions on the destined to make a number of uninformed decisions on an alarmingly regular basis. Executives simply do not have the basis of inadequate relevant information required to make the best decisions in a timely manner. They must thus find a way to create an information."accurate, actionable 360-degree view of their enterprise. Real-time visibility provides not only a means to verify and Economist Intelligence Unit, justify results, but also full confidence that small and midsize companies are leveraging consistency, accuracy, and September 2007timeliness via a single data source to make better, faster decisions.
Why Do Small and Midsize Companies Need Information Visibility?
Small and midsize companies today have access to more information than ever before. However, many of them have fallen victim to their own success. With rapid growth, small and midsize companies everywhere are inundated with waves of data-about products, competitors, suppliers, customers, and so on. They need to get a firm grasp of this data so that their executives can extract the relevant information whenever they need it, to make the right decisions.
The information explosion is not the only problem facing small and midsize companies when it comes to data management. There's also a growing tendency for employees to deploy their IT savvy to create and maintain files on local drives rather than shared databases, effectively creating "micro-silos" of data. This tendency includes such 2practices as using e-mail to work around network servers, according to a 2007 FileMaker survey focusing on IT process management in small and midsize companies. So-called "employee free-styling" (i.e., the tendency of users
1 Kielstra, Paul. Denis McCauley, ed. 2007. "In Search of Clarity: Unravelling the Complexities of Executive Decision-making." Economist Intelligence Unit (September 2007), http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/EIU_In_search_of_clarity.pdf (accessed November 29, 2007). 2 FileMaker International Ltd. 2007. FileMaker Research Report 2007: Business Information Silos Survey (Executive Summary). http://www.filemaker.co.uk/frustrated/downloads/FM_Silo_Ex_Sum.pdf (accessed November 29, 2007).
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to manage IT applications in an autonomous and unsanctioned way) is creating not only a data management problem but also serious workflow headaches, as well as potential compliance catastrophes.
These data silos are preventing departments within small and midsize companies from making the best decisions-and in some cases causing them to make decisions which hurt the organization as a whole. Most enterprise information is buried in spreadsheets and isolated information silos that have evolved over time-all un-doubtedly serving critical short-term needs, but ultimately slowing the pace of decision-making to a crawl. A typical example of this plays out when individual salespeople collect and maintain customer data in Excel spreadsheets-data which to all intents and purposes is "hidden," and which certainly cannot be manipulated by management to make as-sessments regarding profitability, or to perform analyses of the sales funnel. This speaks directly to the quality of the Th... [download for more]