SAS Australia & New Zealand

The amount of stored data worldwide is doubling every 1100 days, yet companies struggle to get usable information out of it, Gordon Clubb says.

“If I look at business intelligence from a customer’s perspective, I would say IT departments still don’t get it,” he says. “Companies have invested heavily in operational systems, data warehouses, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning systems, but when I talk to people they’re struggling with data.”

With new channels such as SMS and email, shorter product lifecycles and more competition, the ability to turn data into intelligence that supports decision-making is critical. “The traditional BI market was really about reporting, dashboards and so on,” he says. “True intelligence involves integrating data across an organisation, and that’s a big trend now. Analytical intelligence is predictive. That’s where companies are trying to go.”

At the same time, business thinking about CRM is changing. Integrated intelligence should help deliver the long promised benefit of customer retention.

People thought a front-end system and data warehouse was CRM, Clubb says. “But CRM is about how you optimise leads through channels, about behavioural modelling rather than event-based marketing.”

Once business applications are plugged into an integrated platform, data is effectively synchronised so that one change to a file is automatically propagated many times across the system.

This article was written by Karen Dearne for The Australian newspaper (News Limited). It appeared in the publication on 20th of February 2007.

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