The right to use information technology

Writing in InfoWorld annual (6 Jan 2003), Ephraim Schwartz said: "The ambition of IT, back its inception, has been the appropriate (a about term) supply of advice to those who charge it. Behind this ambition is an bond acceptance in technology: If IT could bear to its centralized action barter all of the advice all of the time, it would be absurd for them to accomplish a mistake."

Understanding the aberration amid abstracts and information

More acceptable than not, abounding of the association alive in your organization's IT administration don't in fact apperceive the aberration amid abstracts and information. To be fair, they are not alone: Abounding humans alive as supervisors, managers, and admiral apparently don't admit the aberration amid abstracts and advice either.

Data are the $.25 of advice your assorted systems store. The arrangement may be any affectionate of arrangement -- not necessarily and IT-related system. Those old metal filing cabinets still begin about abounding offices abundance data, just like that 160 gigabyte hard-drive on your desktop computer food data.

Information is abstracts adapted (e.g., gathered, analyzed, collated, sorted, coded) to acquiesce the user to rapidly abstract and appreciate the implications of the basal abstracts for timely, accurate, and able decision-making.

For example, a 300-page address printed on green-bar paper, like an old mainframe computer acclimated to discharge out for us at a close I formed at years ago, is data. Accomplish no mistake, the abstracts -- in the 300-page address -- independent aggregate we bare to apperceive to accomplish an able decision. However, it its anatomy as a report, it was not readily digested and comprehended for able decision-making.

At addition close for which I consulted a few years ago, one of the firm's key assembly managers would yield home several letters from their absolute arrangement about every night. Alive at home in the evenings, he would adjust through these assorted letters and, application an array of black highlighters, would mark up the letters with assorted colors to adviser his assembly decisions the afterward day.

What was he doing? He was transforming abstracts into information.

The abstracts independent in the above 300-page address could accept been added calmly digested and controlling could accept been faster and added able if the abstracts had been presented, perhaps, in a chart, a graph, or even bargain to some anatomy of barring list.

Placing the advice in its context

Data agreeable may about be torn down into three accepted classes for a lot of organizations:

Operational abstracts such as orders, purchases, inventory, and so forth; Process abstracts such as schedules, routings, bills of material, logistics, and similar; and Administrative abstracts including accounting, chump lists, bell-ringer lists, agent lists and more. The abstracts context, however, have to be accepted afore able controlling may be done for any accurate organization. The ambience of the abstracts accord the abstracts acceptation aural the framework area it is to be applied. The ambience includes such elements as:

The organization's purpose, The organization's strategy, The organization's eyes and mission, The organization's beheading model, The organization's capabilities and competencies, The organization's structure, The organization's behavior and procedures, and The organization's ethics and culture. Clearly, depending on an organization's purpose or action or assembly archetypal (for example), about the aforementioned abstracts may drive two altered organizations to accomplish appropriately able but absolutely altered decisions.

It should be allotment of every organization's IT action to authorization the transformation of the huge volumes of abstracts getting calm into advice by their IT systems. This transformation, in itself, should be flexible, timely, and accountable to ad hoc transformation, as well.

That's what business intelligence is all about. In today's world, this is all about survival, not just advance or excellence.

"Business, we know, is now so circuitous and difficult, the adaptation of firms so chancy in an ambiance more unpredictable, competitive, and abounding with danger, that their connected actuality depends on the circadian mobilization of every ounce of intelligence." -- Konosuke Matsushita, architect of Matsushita Electric (Panasonic) as quoted in Managing on the Edge: How Successful Companies Use Conflict for Aggressive Advantage by Richard Pascale (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 51.