Businesses still in the dark with some BI

A staggering 60% of businesses believe that current business intelligence (BI) investments have yet to make a significant improvement specifically in their customer management. That’s among findings from research commissioned among 250 CIOs and chief marketing officers across Europe by software services giant Unisys. Indeed, 23% of firms said that current BI systems had made no difference to, or had actually worsened, customer management. And 27% said they could not use existing BI systems to cross-sell and maximise opportunities between departments or products. Overall, 63% of those surveyed identified cross-selling of opportunities as a critical area for BI business improvement. The survey reveals that one of the key barriers to cross-selling and other intelligence-led data analysis is the remaining problem of manual data processing and analysis. Steve Rawsthorn, vice president of sales and marketing for Unisys, says: “From the results, and from Unisys’ own experience, many companies think they have a BI strategy once they purchase a BI application. Businesses need to wake up to the fact that effective BI isn’t just about the software – poor system performance and design are the fastest ways to kill business user interest. “CIOs need to ensure that there is an infrastructure in place, which can monitor a mass of data streams in real time, enable huge databases or information to be shared across departments and provide sufficient storage capacity to analyse data quickly and effectively.”