Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

It is very obvious that analysing your data can provide strategic benfits. But I am often asked how can I do it easily. There are a number of reasons to undertake strategic data analysis including:

economic pressures, just-in-time supply chain management, a more diverse and demanding customer base and government requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Business Intelligence (BI) tools bring information and insights to your business previously unknown and this is occurring in many other large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Strategic data analysis benefits an organisation in many ways including:

• Providing access to statistical and other reporting tools that expose the hidden data that is driving change and growth in an organisation but is rarely measured.
  
• Providing a single point of view into diverse data through the implementation of data mining and data farming techniques.
  
• Identifying non-traditional value measurements that are often overlooked.
  
• Creating the ability to acquire pertinent data needed to make quality decisions based upon actual business trends and conditions.
  
• Providing a way to link strategic enterprise data to current and planned business activities.
  
• Providing access to competitive intelligence in order to create a competitive advantage.
  
• Tracking and measuring Key Performance Indicators.
  

Effective decision support systems depend upon management’s ability to understand an organisation’s underlying data. Key business activities including sales and marketing activities, financial and human resources management and planning, and the activities of other departments are improved when key decision makers have access to the tools necessary to perform strategic data analysis. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

The gap between the ability to link business performance with strategic data is being bridged by the technology delivered by Business Intelligence (BI) tool providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and Business Objects.

Recognising that different businesses have different BI needs, Microsoft offers a suite of BI tools that scale to fit the needs of both technical and non-technical users in small, mid-size and large organisations. These tools are fully compatible with its own line of database products as well as those provided by SAP and other manufacturers. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Viewed more as a BI and strategic data analysis tool provider for mid-sized and large organisations, Oracle offers business intelligence and data warehousing tools including a suite of ETL, OLAP, and Data Mining software products.

Business Objects is also a key player in the strategic data analysis and BI market with their suite of tools that supports major manufacturers including Siebel, Teradata, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and Informatica.

The journey to improving business performance begins with the organisations commitment to performing strategic data analysis and employing BI solutions from the industry’s leading suppliers of quality BI and strategic data analysis tools.