Information Now
Isn’t it amazing how impatient we’ve become? In my grandfather’s day, people were willing to wait days, weeks or even months for important business information. The mail suited them just fine. So did waiting for a clerk to sift through reams of documents only to uncover the wrong information and have
to repeat the process again and again. But there wasn’t any choice, and it didn’t really matter since everyone had to wait the same amount of time for the information they needed.
Today, however, most of us can’t afford to wait around, and we have all kinds of technology at our disposal to make sure that we don’t have to. Whether it’s via our PC, a blackberry, a wireless laptop or a phone (I have all four), our success is often dependent on our ability to access information, analyze it and
make a decision in time to take action. The Internet, with its common standards and universal connectivity, has led to an explosion of information across the enterprise and the extended enterprise and created an infrastructure with a low-cost user interface to power the “information now” world.
Unlike my grandfather, who ran a small business, I don’t have to wait to get the information I need to run my business better. I can get information whenever I want it, in any format, regardless of where I am. I am doing business in real-time.
The push to build the real-time enterprise is based on one central premise that’s true in any economic climate: information is valuable, and the value of information increases as more people across an enterprise can gain immediate access to it and use it to make informed decisions that improve business results.
Real-time information allows businesses to immediately uncover and drive out hidden costs, identify and correct business performance problems before they become catastrophic, and bring about changes in behavior in individuals and groups that improve accountability and better align them with corporate goals.
A recent InformationWeek article, titled “Get it to Them Fast,” summarizes the findings of the magazine’s 2003 Real-Time Information Survey. The article cites “better execution” as the main reason companies are adopting real-time business technology solutions, and identifies customer support as the business function
that can benefit most from real-time information. In addition to customer service, the most frequently identified drivers for real-time information are “business agility, cost reduction, [and] visibility into key performance metrics…”
While my grandfather’s corporate data was housed in a bank of file cabinets in the back office, and his operational systems were all paper-based, the basic premise of business intelligence has always been true: Faster and more accurate decision-making creates competitive advantage and boosts the bottom line. I’ll
bet my grandfather would have liked business intelligence, and he certainly could have used BI software.
In the pages that follow you will see the ingenious ways our customers put our software to work in their organizations to achieve these very goals. And surely you’ll want to read the WebFOCUS feature, which talks about the 450-plus new capabilities in Release 5.
Regards,
Gerald D. Cohen
Related Article
 
|
|
