Few things in life are as frustrating as trying to do a job around the house without the right tool. You struggle to fix a faucet, replace a light switch, or install a set of shelves--and what seemed to be a simple chore turns out to be a lengthy, miserable experience that ends with a trip to the corner store for iodine and bandages. Finally admitting failure, you give up and call in a professional, who arrives and completes the job in minutes. Watching him work, you quickly see the key to his success: not so much his expertise, but rather his ability to reach into a truck, or satchel, and pull out the one crucial thing that you didn't have when you needed it--precisely the right tool.
It is just the same in business. The difference between failure and success often lies not so much in expertise, but rather in having access to precisely the right management tool to do the job at hand.
Today a remarkable new management tool is being installed at the very best companies throughout the world. It is a tool designed to organize information, and thus it is a tool of uncommon power and flexibility. For in today's business environment, the ability to organize information isn't merely desirable; it is essential. After all, today's environment is complex, multinational, fast-paced, and information-driven. It is an environment whose dominant force is change itself.
To compete successfully in this sort of an environment, what any enterprise--from a giant multinational company to a small start-up venture--needs is a mechanism, or a management tool, that can organize information for the unique decision-making needs of that particular enterprise. More precisely, what is needed is a management tool that can sweep across the entire range of available information, sort out the information that is relevant to achieving the strategic objectives the enterprise has set for itself from information that is irrelevant, collect and monitor the relevant information, analyze and evaluate the data, and then--the crucial last task--ensure that the conclusions, judgments, and projections that flow from this information reach key executives at precisely the right time to support their unique decision-making needs.
The information pump
During the last few years, as executives have come to recognize their need to organize information, they have discovered to their surprise that they don't need to go out and invent a management tool to do the job, that such a tool in fact has been around for a long, long time.
Now, hang onto your hat: The generic name for a management tool that organizes information for decision-making executives is intelligence. Yes, intelligence. And the emergence of business intelligence systems--units that organize information for decision-making--is among the most striking and potentially most important business trends of our time.
If at first blush the notion of intelligence as organized information comes as a shock, you are not alone. Say the word intelligence and most people still conjure up vivid images of danger, romance, and intrigue: spies meeting at a seedy restaurant in Berlin or in the shadow of a streetlight in Budapest; satellites streaking through outer space while peering down on enemy missile bases; cars
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