10 IT Problems You Might Not Know You Have

Lack of Sufficient Business Intelligence

Large enterprises, especially in regulated industries including finance and health care, have used business intelligence tools that include data warehouses for years. Midsize and smaller organizations are about to find that they may have a competitive problem if they aren’t ready to implement these technologies too.

Far from being just a rich man’s game, business analytics tools are increasingly being made available to organizations of more modest means. There is little question that these tools can be used by a company to differentiate services and offerings to squeeze more profit out of customer transactions.

Taking advantage of these tools means making a commitment to marrying technology and business process in an organization. To even make the proposal, IT managers have to know that they are running a well-tuned IT infrastructure, including well-managed data collection tools that reliably gather customer transaction information.

Hidden problems that can sabotage a BI project include sloppy data collection and storage procedures. This is especially true when data will be coming from multiple sources such as pharmacy, patient treatment and insurance billing systems.

BI projects demand that IT managers truly understand the business objectives of their organizations. A successful marriage of technology and business means making a commitment to discovering hidden areas of business ignorance in IT and ensuring that technology is put in the service of supporting business success. --CS 

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