Insights & news
The largest CFO Networking Group in Middle East called MECA held an Innovation Summit around Business Intelligence (BI) in Dubai this month. The summit provided participants with an excellent overview of the opportunity that BI can bring to any organisation and how the CFO can make a difference.
I had the pleasure of being a panelist on ”What NOT to do with BI: Practical insights to improve your chances of a successful BI implementation”. Here are my top 3 tips from the panel discussion for any CFO who is looking to implement a BI strategy.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Thomas Davenport, professor and fellow at MIT, caught my attention. Davenport refers to the beginnings of a new era: “After Big Data” in his article Analytics 3.0. While organizations built around massive data volumes — such as Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, Amazon and others — may be ready to move to the next wave of analytics, the full spectrum of big data capabilities is yet to be realized in the traditional organizations we work with on a daily basis.
In the last 14 years I have been living the expansion, consolidation and innovation of the BI market. No longer is BI a set of tools available only to the privileged few in IT or line of business analysts; BI is becoming ubiquitous in many organizations, and it is rapidly reaching into many areas of our lives as consumers. So one may ask, has BI reached full maturity; have we reached a saturation point with only limited evolutionary, incremental value in the years to come?Quite the opposite! While Gartner saw a slowdown of growth for BI Software from 17% in 2011 to 6.8% in 2012 to total $13.1bn worldwide*, we are seeing a tremendous shift in the industry with a series of innovations that are game changing and will deliver growth, if organizations can effectively adopt and transform.
