Aussie companies need smarter business intelligence
Aussie companies need smarter business intelligence
Feb 28, 2005: Media Connect’s Kickstart conference, held on Stradbroke Island, got the ball rolling with some insightful home truths from some straight-talking industry players, one of which criticised Australian organisations for not making sure their data has 100 percent integrity before applying business intelligence solutions.
Steve Hitchman, the managing director of Management Information Principles, which specialises in data management consultancy, data profiling, data integration, data warehousing, and business intelligence, says that the data is useless if it is not accurate before it is driven through a business intelligence system.
Hitchman reckons that too many companies think that applying the software alone is enough to provide a comprehensive analysis of the data that can produce interesting ideas for future strategies, but they do not realise that important validation work has to be put in before the software can be helpful.
“If you look at all of the organisations in Australia, the ones with over 75 percent data accuracy are among the leaders. When companies implement new CRM systems, for example, the reason why they go off the rails and lose millions and millions of dollars is because something has gone wrong with the data migration exercise.
“They have no idea of the things that are wrong in their system. They look at the documentation and try to work out how they are going to integrate it. Well guess what, every single piece of documentation in Australia is wrong. It is divisions away from the truth.”
He says that important code changes within organisations are never recorded in the documentation, because the workers don not update the records. So the migration does not work for companies because they have treated their documents with such disdain.
He says that his company’s software allows organisations to clean the data before it is migrated, and then analyse the data for the purpose of crucial business intelligence findings.,p>“It’s just started to be recognised in the market now that data is really important and the quality of data is really crap. Only 17 percent data migrating exercises finish on time and within budget. 49 percent over-run and 34 percent actually fail completely because they run out of money. This is because everybody underestimates the integrity and quality of their data.
“Most companies that offer business intelligence solutions only offer contingency plans, in case something goes wrong, which of course saves them money. But the consequences are too big with compliance. With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, if your information is wrong you could go to prison.”
Related Article: