Survival Strategy Column

A smart strategic information management (SIM) program will allow a company's management to discover how best to embrace changes in the market. Today there is a fundamental business need to gain competitive advantage. This is built through far-reaching strategic thinking, and supported by a smart strategic information management (SIM) program.

Data warehouse projects sometimes fail because basic issues are ignored. Fundamentals such as identifying a trusted source, training users and ongoing analysis should be addressed from the outset. With nearly any project, mart or warehouse, the rub will be both the extraction and the cleansing of data. In some cases extraction proves to be a big undertaking and the time …

All too often, a great IT concept gets knocked for not producing the benefits and results it initially promised. Projects are started with great expectations of improving business processes and decision-making, as well as revenues and profitability, only to end in tatters after swallowing large sums of money and time with no results visible. This scenario has become common in …

On the public Internet, an information portal employs a profile of users' information requirements and the services of a search engine to help consumers quickly find information to match their needs. An Internet portal provides consumers with a single interface to the vast network of servers that constitute the Internet. Information portals in the corporate environment have a similar objective: …

The new buzz words "corporate portals" or "enterprise information portals" (EIPs) are all about making it easier for business users to access corporate business information. The promised benefits of EIPs are the same as those on the Internet – a simple Web interface that helps users to rapidly sift through information managed by a large distributed computer network.

Knowledge management promotes an integrated approach to the creation, capture, management, access and use of a company's information assets. These include databases and documents, plus expertise and experience of individuals. A data warehouse contains a wealth of knowledge in its software and data structures, and in its processes and business rules. To benefit from this knowledge, companies should use a …

A report from Survey.com, a Californian market research company, states that organisations worldwide are expected to increase warehousing spending from $37.4 billion in 1999 to $148.5 billion by 2003. The report says the increase of 43% a year will be driven by rapid growth in the analysis of enterprise resource planning (ERP) data in a data warehouse, and Web-enabling it …

The Dow Jones/Reuters venture, establishing a global service providing proprietary and third-party business information to corporate and professional markets, quoted independent research saying that the corporate information market may be worth $6 billion by 2002.

The advent of the Internet-enabled application has aligned operational systems more closely with business, moving them from being accessible by a chosen few within the company to the public at large. Business intelligence and data warehousing are going through similar transformations, with businesses demanding their investment support strategic goals more closely.