Five golden rules for converting data to decisions
According to Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence enterprises need to grow beyond the four walls of spreadsheets and start building data-warehouses in order to gain enterprise-wise transparency and a competitive edge.
Business dynamics changes drastically in any industry—be it manufacturing, retail, telecom, pharmaceutical, healthcare or BFSI. There is competition in every business. Performance is the key to the success of any enterprise and performing well is not an option anymore.
Most enterprises have invested in and implemented an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution and may now look upon pulling data from a variety of sources and databases to create reports efficiently—to gain a clear view of operations and to support better decision making.
It is vital for organizations to leverage their data assets to measure their business performance, identify the weak spots and strategically improve their business to scale new heights.
Data remains one of our most abundant yet under-utilized resources. Business Intelligence (BI) allows businesses to integrate this data from disparate sources to provide deeper insight and, by extension, greater competitive advantage.
New interfaces and approaches to BI are empowering decision makers by providing relevant data within a user-friendly interface. BI provides additional levels of performance helping users gain real-time insight into their data. Enterprise-wide BI helps make relevant data available more widely; whereby it helps business users take decisions at the point of impact.
Together, these three broad advances are helping to create BI solutions that allow information workers to make better-informed decisions that are aligned with corporate objectives. Decision making and strategy formulation no longer rely solely on knowing what happened. Now, they can be supported by comprehensive intelligence about what’s happening now and by extension, what is likely to happen.
To ensure that the data can be trusted, a solid data foundation must first be established and aligned with the master data.
One of the most enduring traits of the information age is that we have focused too much on mastering transaction data and not enough on turning it into information and knowledge that can lead to business results. The information systems in organizations gather zillions of bytes of data from business transactions in order to serve operational or record keeping needs. We are awash in data on topics ranging from customer purchases, supplier payments, loan repayment schedules, work hours by charge code and the amount of education and training received by employees. Despite our growing abilities to collect all of this data, however, most of us are still struggling to develop the very capabilities that prompted us to gather data in the first place— the ability to aggregate, analyze, and use data to make informed decisions that lead to action and generate real business value.
I remember a quote of Theodore Roosevelt, “In any moment of decision, the best thing that you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing that you can do is nothing.”
Let us now discuss what should be remembered while in the process of converting data to decisions. The following five points are the basic rules for any corporate to follow for transforming its information into knowledge. We call them the five golden rules for converting data to decisions.
To read 5 Golden Rules for Converting Data to Decisions visit http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20100607/expressintelligententerprise12.shtml
Posted on June 14th, 2010 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: Business Intelligence
Having read your article, i must say i’m highly impress and i have been able to gain a lot from it.I a’m a young researcher intended to specialize on Business Intelligence (BI) and currently doing Msc Dissertation on Business Intelligence in Telecoms Industry. I will appreciate if i can get full reference to this article and others especially books or journals related to my research area.
Thank you for your good research work.
I totally agree with Folarin that this is a very good article on 5 Golden Rules for Business Intelligence (BI) and converting Data to Decision.
[...] Data to Decision" For those interested in reading the original blog, here's a link: Five golden rules for converting data to decisions | BI Blog | Business Intelligence (BI) Blog After reading the article, I began to reflect on my own experience, to which I only had one simple [...]