As companies continue to focus on managing costs and capital in these challenging economic times, the need to turn reams of data into actionable business insight has never been more imperative. Business leaders are now challenged to get more productivity from the same or fewer amounts of people resources as well as manage inventories and demand forecasting to the highest level of accuracy. As companies plan growth strategies to take advantage of the future economic recovery, their efforts will be guided by dynamic, granular insight from across the business. Using that information to make decisions at the speed of business will become the “new normal” in a post-recession economy.
Traditional tools – “Your fathers BI” – are not suited to the needs of business executives and managers in this new environment. Gone are the days of large CAPEX-consuming IT projects that take months or years to deliver business value and the days when IT tolerated their role as glorified report writers for business executives. On-demand business analytic (BA) tools will replace “your fathers BI” and play a major role in delivering insights that help organizations manage costs and discover new competitive advantages at the speed of business.
I was speaking with a customer recently that offers solutions for online merchants. Wendy LaHaye, Vice President of Products & Professional Services at Order Motion, made a good point about how on-demand BA solutions can drive performance-enhancing initiatives. She said, “The key to success in today’s challenging economy is not lots and lots of raw data – it’s the ability to understand that data so you can make effective decisions, manage costs and find opportunities to unlock value that might have otherwise been overlooked – in a timely fashion.” She chose the PivotLink solution because it makes timely business information readily available to a large base of various users, in a way that is highly relevant and useful to each.
The “new normal” requires a faster, easier and more cost-effective way for decision makers to securely access relevant data and take analytics into their own hands. This shift will help bring down organizational stove pipes within a company and the boundaries between supply chain partners so that sharing information and insight becomes more dynamic and fluid. The concept of dynamic insight is something that IT analyst Merv Adrian touches on in his BeyeNETWORK blog.
At PivotLink we’re building the leading on-demand BA solution that helps companies keep pace with the “new normal.” We are the only SAS 70 Type II certified SaaS business intelligence solution, which puts us well ahead of the competition in providing customers with the highest standards of safety and security. Over the past two years we’ve experienced phenomenal growth – a testament to the fact that business users are yearning for new tools to help them improve business visibility and manage through the challenging economy. We deliver On-demand BA solutions to over 15,000 paid subscribers who generate over 1.5m analytical reports every month. Moreover, I am confident that adoption of PivotLink’s solution will accelerate as more and more businesses catch on to the “new normal”.
