Increasing your business IQ

The aim of business intelligence (BI) is honourable. You need data to make a decision and wouldn’t it be fantastic if the exact data you needed was at your fingertips?

BI is meant to help employees make good decisions based on relevant data in a timely manner. But how often is the information you want in the head of the person who just left the firm? Or locked in a spreadsheet on the C: drive of the employee who pulled together the data in the first place? And how do you decide in advance what you will need for decision making?

In addition to these challenges, there is an increasing number of data sources and these sources are fragmented. Not only must workers contend with traditional sources, which sees data held in spreadsheets, they also have to consider new ones – social media activity relating to a company brand, traffic to the company web site and global markets data that may or may not hold the secret as to whether there is demand for a business idea.

In our in-depth guide to the BI market and technologies, we speak to consumer goods company Diageo, best known for household brands such as Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker, about its use of BI and analytics platform SAP; and to London South Bank University, which is using IBM’s business analytics software to monitor students’ progress and analyse course performance.