With so much invested in capturing and storing data, Philip Carter, associate practice director for IDC's Business Analytics practice in Asia/Pacific believes that organizations need to look to analytics to navigate rough markets in the current economy. “Moving forward, companies need to start developing this data into real 'intelligence' by offering it to a broader spectrum of users, as well as leveraging forward-looking predictive analytics to drive competitive advantage in the market where there is a potential recovery in the short-term,” Carter said in a statement.
IDC identifies three main drivers that move business analytics into broader mainstream adoption in Asia/Pacific:pervasive business intelligence, performance management and risk management.
Business intelligence has become more pervasive. The performance, availability, and user interfaces of BI solutions in the market have improved significantly over the years. This enables deployment of decision support and automation functionality to a broader spectrum of users. In turn, it has raised the visibility of BI across various departments and at the boardroom level, which has helped to break down the “information silos” that tend to persist in organizations moving down this path.
The finance department is starting to see the benefits of budgeting and planning tools as part of a broader performance management framework to drive operational efficiency throughout the organization.
More advanced and sophisticated forms of analytics solutions for risk management, resource optimization, and demand forecasting are actively being implemented by organizations in the region. Some of these deployments are embedding components of the analytical functionality into operational applications in what IDC sees as early signs of a shift towards its vision of Intelligent Process Automation – enabling front-office employees with better decision-making power to direct increase revenue and cut costs.
From a different perspective, Accenture's Greg Todd believes that analytics can transform organizations into high-performance enterprises and organizations that use analytics are best able to stay competitive.
Todd also correlates information management with the power of analytics in decision-making. "Who uses the information and what they use it for is key, as businesses need to be very critical about using analytics to drive their decision-making."
Todd believes decision-makers who understand and manage with this in mind will make much better and more timely decisions at a point when it can make the greatest difference. "Tough economic times mean solid business practices and efficient use of data are simply much more important today." he says.
Julie Langenkamp is editor-in-chief of Information Management. She can be reached at julie.langenkamp@sourcemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JulieLangenkamp.
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