Many organizations around the world have built Business Intelligence systems and applications using the spiral method. This method enables systems' building in a gradual and methodical way with no need for detailed planning or foreseeing the "end of the road". However, the changing reality which is led by broad economical developments, forces the modern organization into a renewed deployment. This deployment will allow understanding of the current and future needs in available information; leveraging the existing information assets and building a progressing outline which will improve the organization's ability to cope.

In recent years we experience significant economical developments, which influence the decision making processes in modern organizations:

• Mergers and Acquisitions – this kind of activity which used to be a significant event in the life of any organization forcing it to special preparation, has become a frequent and reoccurring process which needs to be executed rapidly, starting for the due diligence stage and up to processes deployment in the merged company.
• Building a virtual organization – an organization whose borders are open to it partners, suppliers and customers. This requires a continuous flow of information inward and outward.
• Optimizing potential of customers recruitment – telecommunications, media companies, banks and other companies find it hard to recruit new customers, thus they concentrate in customer retention and in trying to increase the average revenue per customer (ARPU).
• Increasing competition and repeated strategic update requisite – In any industry the ever growing competition requires rapid changes to create new competitive advantages or to neutralize the competitive advantages of the competition.
• Regulations and procedures – new regulations and procedures such as SOX which focuses on improving control and transparency of report, Basel II for risk management and more, require deployment of new techniques for using organizational information.

Every organization has to adjust rapidly to these changes. The most practical way is to improve the decision making support in three organizational levels: Strategically, Tactical and Operational.

The above have significant impact on the organizational information systems:

• Empowering planning and prediction capabilities (churn, profitability, segmentation etc.).
• Complex campaign management capabilities.
• Need for proper reply and proposals in any contact with the customer (call center, technician visit).
• Requiring information in real time.
• Increasing integration between a variety of internal and external information sources.
• Data quality assurance.
• Availability of processed information to as many factors in the organization (to the last of the employees) and out of it.
• Need to make the organizational strategy known and control its implementation.
• And more.

Organizations were active since the 80's in implementation of BI systems, Analytical models for planning and prediction and more. These systems elevated the organization's capabilities to make decisions. However, every 3 years the organization has to re-evaluate its information management strategy, due to the gap, created during time, between the original plan and the current need.

The gap is comprised of three layers:

• Business requirements which are answered by the existing information assets – OK
• Business requirements which are not answered by the existing information assets – not OK
• Redundant information assets – junk factories

To close the gaps, an Enterprise Information Management Strategy has to be built. The process of building the EIM strategy comprises of four aspects (drawing 1):

Business

• Business vision
• The organizational value map which includes performance measures (KSF, KPI)
• Business requirements, ranging from the environment level and upto the organizational function level
• Business case – ROI, success measures

Information assets

• Information sources mapping
• Existing information in the BI systems'  mapping
• Usage monitoring and classification
• Information availability
• Information quality

Architecture

• Hardware
• Software
• Interfaces and integration
• Quality plan and data optimization
• Authorization management

                                            Drawing 1

In the scope of this process, workshops have to be performed for the upper and mid-management levels, in order to identify needs and reach a consensus regarding importance and priority (Drawing 2).

                                                Drawing 2

For demonstration purposes, following are several examples for modern solution components:

• Dashboards / BI Portals - A Cockpit-like component which gathers all the information required by management to perform their tasks.
• Scorecards / Corporate Performance Management (CPM) – CPM applications are based on the tight connection between the organizational strategy and the performance de facto.
• Campaign Management / analytical CRM – CRM applications have become a necessity for modern organizations that provide service to their customers. However few are the organization who managed to turn the accumulated information on their customers and the interaction with them, into marketing, sales and retention activities.
• Event Based Systems – BI systems enable to analyze phenomenon and trends. The problem is the BI tool analysis presents an answer to a defined business question asked by the user. However, in many cases exceptional events, with significant costs to the organization, hide beneath the information main trends and distribution. Event based tools identify anomalities in the information and pop them up to the users according to subjects and severity levels, via reports, emails and even SMS.
• Enterprise Information Integration (EII) – A platform for building a Virtual Data Federation, creating a single overview on all the organizational data (variety of many information sources – technologies, sites etc.) in real time using a virtual unification. The need for Real Time BI is also connected to this subject deriving from the aspiration to reduce events response time. For example: the service center identifies that a VIP customer had a number of disconnections in the last hour and thus can respond accordingly.
• Data Quality and Optimization – With BI capabilities improvement, increased availability and implementation in the organization, the dependency in information increases. However, due to problems in systems integration and other processes in the organization, feeding problems and even bugs, we might create a threat on the decision makers who blindly trust the information.

Summary
A modern organization operating on the basis of an information management infrastructure that was planned several years ago, though upgraded and improved, resembles a race driver who drives an old car. Thus his chances of winning the race – are low!

Every organization has to built or refresh it information management strategy every three years, evaluate the existing assets, the new needs, erase junk factories, identify modern solutions and perform the necessary changes in order to get back into the race. This will turn the information infrastructure, in use of decision makers of all levels – into a significant force multiplier.

The Author is CEO Ness-Ness-Gilon Global, CEO Synergy.