Can a transaction at a retail store give you insight into the spending habits of your most valued customers? Is your data locked away from the business of running your business or is it used to open new doors of opportunity for your business? Knowing your customers and keeping them close, reducing costs, managing market and operational risk--these are all top-of-mind pressures for executives today.

In today’s economic climate, organizations need to predict, rather than react to critical events that can affect their businesses. Integrating and analyzing different kinds of information coming from different sources is vital. And while companies have invested millions in technology environment and business intelligence software, many still lack the agility and flexibility within the existing infrastructure to yield the benefits required to survive and thrive in the economic tailspin.

Often, business intelligence projects are bound by the limitations of the data itself—heterogeneous, locked in legacy systems and applications, often stagnant, fragmented and disconnected from the real-time business operation. Business processes built on legacy frameworks can’t support the dynamic and expanded business ecosystems that are developing even as new business possibilities emerge from the market upheaval.

But more tools and isolated data in more disconnected warehouses will not fix the problem. Organizations must close the gap between the information they have and the information they can use. A new approach to harnessing the unrealized potential of business intelligence is required.

The key is to connect the intelligence scattered across the business ecosystem, reconcile data silos and allow the knowledge gained to flow across the business. Also important is business analytics, embedded into both processes and applications for timely access to information required to make rapid decisions across the organization.

Using business intelligence, decisions such as offering a new product to your customers, detecting credit card fraud or offering variable pricing options for energy usage, can be supported with timely and relevant data. And this exchange of information throughout the business ecosystem can reveal new ways to use information to fuel new business opportunities.

Mastering your information complexity is a tall order. Listed below is HP’s guidance when developing a business intelligence strategy, based on real-world experiences with thousands of customers over the years.

1. Develop a process-driven approach that optimizes and transforms established data management practices and data governance processes. This positions IT to be more aligned and responsive to business needs
2. Leverage field-tested methodologies and accelerators that can help to quickly deliver the required BI solution at the lowest cost
3. Implement a business intelligence reference architecture and integrate BI into the enterprise architecture
4. Build a data access layer into the architecture and re-engineer the physical database structure as this can result in a dramatically faster database design process and time to market
5. Define methods for building shared services focused on creating new, reusable architecture capabilities rather than on development of application-specific functions

Whether you are in the early stages of building an infrastructure for business intelligence or expanding the one you have, there are four key steps to follow as you either begin or continue your journey to turn disconnected data into business intelligence.

1. Prioritize your business strategy, then align your IT strategy to business objectives
2. Foster and manage innovation during the enterprise integration process through rapid prototyping of models that drive the integration of your organization’s information
3. Manage your data by establishing an information practice to create a world-class, highly governed and well-managed information program
4. Create specific milestones that demonstrate the progress you’re achieving as you drive toward your longer-term business intelligence goals

HP Business Intelligence solutions blend years of consulting experience with expert partner technology and a powerful enterprise data warehousing platform to deliver integrated solutions that can help you connect intelligence to the opportunities inside your business. Our BI consulting services brings deep understanding of customer environments and workflows to a range of services based on proven, repeatable best practices and methodologies built specifically for BI. At the core of our BI solutions is HP Neoview, our proven enterprise data warehouse platform. Neoview is built to concurrently handle more data, more users and more business decisions—faster—as it is designed to manage a dynamic mix of both analytical and transaction processing workloads simultaneously. Learn more about HP Business Intelligence solutions and what they can do for your organization.

	Your feedback is important to us. Was this article useful/informative?
	Not at all(1)		Neutral(3)		Definitely(5)