Quick - and slower - wins for infopros
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Almost three quarters of companies that claim to perform better than their peers say that data is “extremely valuable” in helping them gain competitive advantage.  No great surprises there, perhaps – but what opportunities do such findings offer to ambitious information professionals?

Even though the respondents to the Economist Intelligence Unit report, Levelling the Playing Field, list a myriad ways in which information supports competition, most also acknowledge that they are “awash in unused data”.  In addition, companies that adopt a top down approach, reserving data mainly for management use, seem less effective at exploiting it than those that find ways to democratise it.

Respondents also agreed that “accuracy trumps detail”.  Getting the basic insight – about a new prospect, a change in a raw material price or an emerging manufacturing problem – is more important than being able to analyse every detail.

All the signs are that this trend will continue to gather momentum.  Gartner forecast recently that the global market for business intelligence software would increase by 9.7% in 2011, despite sluggish economic growth – and it also believes that this is a pivotal year for data warehousing, with database management system vendors increasingly forced by new competitors to shift from storage and access to delivery and comprehension.

This ought to be great stuff for information managers – but the trouble is they no longer hold the monopoly of information sources, if indeed they ever did.  The days of “rip and ship” are gone – or at the very least it’s outsourced – and, as FreePint’s current survey is likely to show, the distinction between infopros and end users seems to be more one of degree than substance.

So where are the quick – and slower – wins?  Well, the democratisation that EIU speaks of applies just as much to infopros as to anyone else in the enterprise – and they may even get a helping hand from the technology; the new generation of business intelligence tools will need to be “simple, mobile and fun”, Gartner suggests.

Next, as a recent Economist briefing makes clear, a democratised corporation – one that woos “Facebook-using, iPhone toting youngsters” – may also be a leaky one.  Cleverer software may be part of the solution – but so too is a sensible policy about what to keep secret and how powerful a “transparency strategy” to have.

And lastly, you can’t really participate in the intelligence process unless you can crunch the numbers.  Information World Review recently drew attention to the opportunities for infopros offered by a new University of East Anglia (UEA) MSc course to help meet the shortage of statisticians.

According to UEA, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has called statistics “the sexy job in the next 10 years”.  Now who wouldn’t want that?

« Blog