Business integration doesn't make your company more intelligent

Mike Ferguson’s keynote Tuesday afternoon summed up the entire day and we started with application integration, went on to business integration and that the challenge now is Optimization. This means that we need to get the entire enterprise running towards the same objectives. The challenge is immense, because it’s not only technology, it’s also getting work processes and the people in the enterprise to work together, and we have to make sure that all levels of the organizations follow the lead from the C-level?

“Steering wheels” exist at all levels of the organization. It is important that everyone steers in the same direction or the business will be torn apart,” as Mike Ferguson put it

To make that possible it is necessary that the systems reflect the way the corporation works while giving the managers control downwards and getting data from below. At the same time the infrastructure needs to be able to sustain changes continuously without exposing it to errors or vulnerabilities.

And with the explosion of data, sooner or later it will be impossible to give people all the information they need to make decisions on all events for the business. This makes way for the need of automated decisions, claims Mike Ferguson.

Still, today, most of the world’s larger companies, in one way or the other, have room for improvement, even with basic stuff like common data names and definitions. A data quality firewall is necessary at every point of data entry, to prevent bad data from entering the systems. And even when that is taken care of, there is still the almost universal challenge of getting unstructured data into the BI-systems.

The goal is to place BI in the centre of the enterprise and connect it with all of the enterprise and it needs to be available wherever it’s needed, whenever it’s needed. Mike Ferguson calls this Right Time Business Optimization. To do this it is absolutely necessary to react before the data reaches storage – even in memory.

This is the challenge for the modern enterprise and no one has solved it yet, but Mike Ferguson predicts that automated decisions will start to make an impact already in 2009-2012.

I think this is highly unlikely that there will be any impact what so ever, since automated decisions already take place in most enterprises and since they really have nothing to do with BI in particular. Intelligent business systems will continue to evolve and more automated decisions will enter any enterprise.

If Mr. Ferguson is referring to automation of strategic decisions then this could – however compelling it may sound – pose a significant threat to a business that follows this path. Because any automated decision and structure can be mapped and reverse engineered by competitors who can then take advantage of the rigid structure inherent in automated systems against the business. Automation of strategic decisions will lock corporations into fixed reaction patterns making them much easier to predict by competitors who will not hold back.

The woes of BI in the coming information explosion can be much more easily handled by democratization of BI throughout the enterprise.