Panorama Business Intelligence

Companies that deploy social business intelligence are able to analyze and take advantage of various new forms of information, Forrester Research senior analyst James Kobielus said in a recent interview with eCRM Guide.

According to Kobielus, social BI allows businesses to bring in unstructured and semi-structured information from various customer sources. And such information allows companies to form a full view of customers, including their demographics and their pyschographics, to better understand how they will react to market shifts.
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A recent report from TechTarget recounted the head-first plunge Anna’s Linens, a national home furnishings retail chain, took with its business intelligence deployment.

The first thing the company did was create a department with the sole responsibility of handling its analytics. That, chief financial officer Neil Watanabe said, has made for more efficient reporting because the data is accessed more quickly and from the correct files.
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Casino surveillance departments could use business intelligence in a number of areas that could benefit the organization as a whole, an industry expert recently told SecurityInfoWatch.com.

Darrin Hoke, director of surveillance for L’Auberge du Lac Casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana, said he believes surveillance can compile business intelligence that can be used to improve casino floor, hotel and restaurant operations. For example, he said integrating and analyzing data from surveillance can help determine how well slot signage draws foot traffic.
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As identity and access management continue to fail, research firm Gartner recently predicted that the aim of such initiatives will shift from administration to business intelligence during the next three years, Computer Weekly reports.

While business intelligence has been high on the priority list of many companies, those that have already deployed the technology will look to broaden its scope to include other areas of the organization, such as IAM.

“For example, joining together data in IAM systems and security logs with other data could be massively valuable to both IT and the business,” James Richardson, BI research director at Gartner, said at the recent IAM Summit 2011 in London, according to Computer Weekly.

This will happen because project failures prompt 50 percent of companies to shift IAM efforts to intelligence from administration, Gartner contends.
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As with other hosted applications, cloud-based business intelligence solutions, such as those delivered through a SaaS model, make sense for companies looking to cut costs and increase agility within the IT department, according to a recent Computerworld UK report.

“Instead of buying servers and software licenses up front as a large, sunk capital cost, paying monthly fees from operating budgets can be less expensive over the life of the application,” the report states.
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