Summary

Facilitating timely information in the right context for users in is the largest challenge companies trying to improve overall business performance face. At the core of this challenge is having an information management architecture that can adapt and deliver on the needs of business today and in the future. While seemingly simple in concept, this is one of the CIO's biggest concerns today. Even business management knows the innate limitations of their information architecture and its ability to deliver on business requirements. To begin to address this issue, companies must abandon conventional wisdom and their historical data-centric approach and adopt a user-and-information-requirements approach to enable performance management.

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Demand for information is increasing at such a fast pace that IT organizations are struggling to deliver timely responses to the information and key performance indicator (KPI) requests of business. Because of the unfortunate state of most companies' information architecture, these requests can takes months not days to satisfy. This has driven business and operational management to become more involved with understanding and driving new investments to overcome these shortfalls. This has caused many organizations to re-examine their existing approaches for providing access and delivery of information consistently across the organization.

This re-examination is leading many companies to consider standardization/consolidation of integration and information management technologies and the BI solutions and tools used to deliver relevant information and business reports. Reducing costs to fund new investments in performance management is another motivation for standardization/consolidation within the IT portfolio. As global organizations take on this approach, business users must re-examine their IT priorities to ensure they are balanced in delivering value in the short term but also meeting the longer term information architecture requirements that are critical for IT.

Ventana Research continues to see a significant focus on the data-to-user approach, data warehousing to their information architecture and business requests, instead of a user-to-data approach that leverages business intelligence and performance management. The data-to-user approach along with simply picking a best-of-breed tool for data integration, data warehousing, metadata management, and business intelligence tools will not necessarily bring full business value sought by CIO and business management from IT investments. IT organizations should consider best practices that balance best-of-breed and integrated solutions. The first step is to evaluate individual technologies in the context of the entire information architecture and not as separate technologies.

To rapidly meet business requests in the short term, IT organizations should examine how evolving performance management and BI approaches can provide value in parallel to the re-design of existing information architecture and management. Many software providers have evolved their integration management capabilities to deliver cross-functional information faster than traditional data warehouse centric approaches. Many of these vendors have matured their capabilities to include integration technologies integrated with metadata management to facilitate information flow to the business users. In some cases, new technology for dynamically querying disparate data sources and integrating the information based on the users requests have become a break-through approach for many global organizations.

Assessment

To bring faster and more relevant information to business, IT and business management must create a parallel strategy to improve the information architecture and management backbone of an organization while delivering value to business in the short term. New advancements in integration management technology for event and data integration through dynamic and disparate query support, not previously believed possible by most IT organizations, have now been proven in enterprise deployments. As you continue your balancing of transaction-centric ERP and CRM implementations and move towards retro-fitting your existing information management and new performance management investments, Ventana Research strongly advises that you take a user-and-information approach. Examine the new technology innovations that can provide significant business value to your company. Many global organizations have already found significant competitive advantage in these new approaches to business intelligence and performance management.