The job of the CIO has changed dramatically in recent years. Seventy-six percent of CIOs say their roles are becoming more strategic as organizations look to use information to create a competitive advantage. By providing information access that will help employees exceed performance expectations, increase customer satisfaction, and fuel expansion, CIOs are being called on to contribute directly to growth.
How can CIOs improve decision-making and optimize performance? Despite vast amounts of crucial business data residing in disparate systems, according to a recent survey of IT executives 64 percent of CIOs don’t think management has the right information to run their business. A CIO’s ability to utilize technology to distribute that information in the format users want has fuelled the shift in their responsibility.
Business intelligence (BI) allows organizations to integrate applications and databases essential to users and enables analysis of information to optimize decision-making. The hitch is in finding the right combination of information accessibility and processing power to effectively support BI across the extended enterprise.
This paper will help CIOs answer the following questions:
- How simple is it to answer event-driven or ad hoc questions based on current systems and data?
- What proportion of time is spent on collection and input of data as opposed to analysis?
- Is the IT department consumed with running queries, reports, and obtaining information from disparate databases?
- How easily and quickly can information be disseminated to the people who need it, in the format they want?
- Is it easy to identify trends in the organization’s performance?
- Does senior management have a single view of information?
- Can information be distributed to customers, employees, and partners in a consistent fashion?
Information Access for Any Industry
With business intelligence expertise, organizations in any industry can better understand their business information and react quickly to keep customers and contend with a broadened competitive landscape. CIOs help these strategic efforts by harnessing resources to:
- Reduce enterprise cost structures
- Improve operational scale
- Raise application performance
In financial services organizations, for example, business intelligence helps to retain and expand the client base, improve cross-selling opportunities, and increase profitability through a better understanding of customer behavior, needs, and preferences. These organizations also need to detect and deter fraudulent activity – such as money laundering and identity theft – as well as better manage the risk associated with investments, credit and lending, and consumer bankruptcies. The BI challenge for insurance is to streamline operations and cut costs while at the same time retain and expand the sales channel and customer base. BI is used to access virtually any data source, turn that data into meaningful information, and deliver it in real time to executives, managers, agents, customers, vendors, and partners. The main concerns for an insurance company’s CIO include metric management and scorecarding, agent-network management, callcenter performance analysis, claims processing and tracking, risk management, fraud detection, statutory reporting, and inter-enterprise collaboration.
The Internet has created a new consumer dynamic for the retail industry. Customers have access to more choices and detailed product information than ever before. Retailers are also struggling to address the multi-channel shopper, who makes purchases in stores, on the Web, and in catalogs. By helping to addressing the changing consumer landscape, market-leading BI empowers retail companies to increase organizational responsiveness and provide critical visibility into business operations. This increased opportunity for customer interaction brings with it an overwhelming amount of information. As a result, retailers must integrate their channels in order to address customer demands quickly.
Through the automation, integration, and standardization offered with BI, companies can gain better insight into the business thereby improving decision-making.
Effective Use of Technology: The Core of BI
Business intelligence requires effective use of technology. Central to this delicate mix is the right databases, applications, software, and hardware to ensure wide-scale efficiencies that will define the strategic difference for your organization.
Powerful new mainframe servers and highly scalable business intelligence applications are coming together to help organizations achieve these goals, without expensive, time-consuming, resourcesapping system integration and application development initiatives. When organizations seek to improve their business-critical operations and business intelligence capabilities, they look to industry leaders.
