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| Report back from the ITWeb BI Summit and Excellence Awards 2012 |
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 New BI architectures needed
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2012
Business users demand more information and they need it faster than ever before, says BI expert Rick van der Lans.
The business intelligence (BI) world is moving into the second era of data warehousing in order to meet new requirements from business users. By 2012, business units will control at least 40% of the total budget for BI.
This is according to Rick van der Lans, international BI expert from R20/Consultancy, who gave an overview of global trends in the BI arena during this morning's keynote address at the ITWeb BI Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston.
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 Quicker and better BI needed
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 29 Feb 2012
There needs to be a balance between doing BI quicker and better, says 9sight Consulting's Barry Devlin.
The biggest dilemma facing organisations today is how to manage business intelligence (BI) quicker and better.
This is according to Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sight Consulting, during this morning's ITWeb BI Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston.
“Data consistency and quality was the original business driver for data warehousing. In the past, there were multiple disparate and inconsistent data sources that were never designed to work together, and had incomplete and low-quality data. The goal was to achieve a single version of the truth.”
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 Consumerisation of IT fuels self-service BI
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2012
While data is a key component of the decision-making process, it's not the only component, says QlikTech's John Callan.
Business intelligence (BI) is rapidly growing at a 7% compound annual growth rate, and is increasingly moving towards a self-service approach.
This is the view John Callan, senior director for global product marketing at QlikTech, who presented on user-driven BI during today's ITWeb BI Summit that took place at The Forum, in Bryanston.
“BI is typically in the top five priority list, if not the top priority for CIOs worldwide. Organisations are using data as the raw material to assist them in the decision-making process that requires them to be agile.”
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 Big data brings big value
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 29 Feb 2012
The question is not how much big data is out there, but how much of it is useful, says Dataways' Bill Hoggarth.
Big data is the new source of productivity, growth and competitive advantage, said Bill Hoggarth, MD of Dataways, who spoke at this morning's ITWeb BI Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston.
Hoggarth said that while Gartner, Forrester and IDC analysts tout big data as one of the main business intelligence (BI) challenges in terms of complexity, volume and variation, business must have a need to do something valuable with that data.
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 Bad data destroys BI projects
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 29 Feb 2012
Messed up old data plus new technology equals expensive old messed up data, says EOH's Jane Thomson.
Up to 80% of large business intelligence (BI) projects that fail do so because of bad data, said Jane Thomson, executive director of EOH, during yesterday's ITWeb BI Summit, in Bryanston.
“Business is not listening to their IT departments when IT asks for help. In addition, most enterprise organisations have complex systems and don't have a single unified data structure design or integrated architecture.”
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Quick facts: FNB Connect case study
Farren Roper, head of products and markets, FNB Connect, reveals how FNB uses data to drive competition at ITWeb's BI Summit in Bryanston this morning.
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2012
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FNB Connect's data mining revealed what kind of connectivity and handsets clients use, which lead to the development of the FNB mobile app. |
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FNB Connect saw the trend towards mobility and first provided bandwidth to clients, then VOIP (converged communications), then released the mobile app. |
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Data revealed the bank's network had idle capacity when branches were closed. The bank decided to give it to clients as value-add. |
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FNB Connect has a telecommunications license which they've leveraged to provide VOIP services for clients, encouraging loyalty. |
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The original Connect app gave FNB the data that was used for designing the banking app. "Simple, intuitive, safe, add value." |
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FNB has 110 000 active clients using their app, close to R2 billion transactions. Generating 6 000 leads per month. |
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Roper emphasised the importance of an innovative business culture that can make proper use of BI. |
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FNB Connect is able to track user habits when they use FNB's bandwidth - demographic info and popular websites drive business strategy. |
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Regarding @ rbjacobs, FNB's Twitter account: "Most if not all tweets are read. There's a team of people sitting reading and responding in a human way." |
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