How to turn numbers and data into useful information? The challenge becomes more complicated with the scale of processed data. And yet, a single digit can be a component of many pieces of information. Although the domestic market is only just entering the phase of popularizing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, it is precisely consultants and IT specialists from Poland who can become pioneers in the field of visualizing knowledge derived from BI systems.
Where does the need for BI solutions come from?
While small enterprises generate up to several thousand pieces of data per month, corporations must process tens of millions of digits in the same period. Leaving aside financial and geopolitical factors, in large companies, the hunger for knowledge stems from a technical problem: how to process billions of digits, which increase every day, in an ongoing, constructive, and responsible manner. Various questions about the current state of the enterprise are asked simultaneously by many managers. The concept of Business Intelligence, in the shortest terms, consists of processing data into knowledge, and more specifically into coherent, useful reports and analyses. Reporting systems, before they were called BI, have been developed for over twenty years. And yet, studies on the BI concept indicate that in Poland, nearly 90 percent of enterprises still implement it through operations conducted in Excel spreadsheets. This group also includes banks and large companies carrying out investments. Very useful spreadsheets cease to be sufficient in complex organizations where management information needs to be delivered quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Before BI comes…
The answer to the question of why BI has such a modest share in company management is provided by an analysis of the stages of market saturation with subsequent categories of IT solutions. The most important one ended with the last century and consisted of companies equipping themselves with ERP and MRP class systems. At the end of the last decade, a separate path of enterprise computerization developed in Poland for those who wanted to build a competitive advantage based on new sources of information. CRM class solutions appeared, which were intended to support sales processes and the company’s communication with its customers.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 4/2005.