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The importance of analytics and access to the "right information at the right time by the right people" has been largely heralded as a business imperative and essential to enabling the execution of successful business strategy. Consequently, more and more departmental and enterprise-wide data aggregation and analysis projects have come into existence with applications deployed in hopes to more efficiently and effectively understand "the business." Despite these nominal developments that might otherwise be taken as presaging a new "culture of analysis" for business management, there is a widening gap between the ability of the new technologies to deliver information beyond management expectations and the actual use of that data by management to make improved business decisions. This article will discuss the technology gap, building a culture of analysis and risk management data application.
The Technology Gap
Companies frequently encounter the widening gap between technology and decisions because as businesses rapidly change with external factors (i.e., the competitive landscape) and internal factors (i.e., mergers and acquisitions, product and business strategy), there remains an inability of associated data structures to keep pace. While different technology vendors and data incompatibilities are often to blame, lapses in defined processes commonly lead to loss of important data. For example, during a company merger, the history and meaning of a company's data, resident only in human repositories, may be lost due to changes in the workforce. Other times, companies don't have a strategy for managing and using that data, limiting the ability to successfully leverage data analysis into a viable business strategy. Successful analytics are not simply about having access to information, but also taking that information and framing it into a context with which to make decisions. In other words, the best technology in the world is useless if the right people and processes are not in place to leverage that technology.
Technology-Enabled Organizations
As companies become increasingly adept at extracting and analyzing data, ironically, they often become slower to act. This "analysis paralysis" is a result of too great a focus on getting as much data as possible and not enough focus on developing strategies based on using the right data. The successful enterprise effectively extracts only the data required to make a decision and quickly...