Testing Ground Breaks the Budget Blow-outs

January 24, 2008: A Sydney university has teamed up with Data Agility to offer a business intelligence (BI) and information management (IM) research unit for organisations to test the viability of a data project before it blows the budget.

Marking an Australia first, the BI and IM commercial research venture will make the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) city campus its home, with projects overseen by Tom Hintz, professional engineer and the Dean of IT.

The unit is designed to meet the needs of organisations seeking answers to questions buried within their large amounts of data. With companies able to test the commercial value of their data ‘theories’ before embarking on a full-scale project, the viability of the project can be tested before going live.

John Neville managing director at Data Agility says the unit will offer BI and IM research for organisations to, “investigate and resolve business issues by discovering hidden gems of knowledge available in their data.”

Data Agility and UTS say the service will focus on interpreting, manipulating and analysing data to discover any new commercial value that could be leveraged by using available data more effectively.

While the service is not free, alleviating a blow-out in costs from all-too familiar project failures is likely to have many organisations commit to a test-run.

Hintz says the unit builds on the faculty’s existing BI and IM research in lines with Data Agility’s expertise in data management.

For UTS, the unit is likely to build on the Faculty of IT’s established reputation for research, including its technology developed for detecting fraudulent behaviour in banking records.

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