One of our business partners and new Guest Contributor, William Laurent, writes about the need for Business Intelligence - skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context to gain better maximum competitive advantage.
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The last five years has seen an exponential increase in the complexity and distribution of data and business processes for most medium-to-large size Japanese companies.
With a blatant lack of documentation and metadata on their business rules, systems/process dependencies, and poor targeted accountability, more and more of these companies are seeing a sharp decline in their ability to compete and react successfully to change.
Yet some of these Japanese companies seem to avoid applying true best practices in governance and business intelligence which would allow them to better compete globally in their industries. In the course of my work in this field over the years with both U.S and Japanese companies, I have found that an alarming number of Japanese companies have out of control redundancies in business processes, no concept of business rules heritage, and a preposterous number of non-automated mission-critical business processes which are still being done manually.
For a country so technologically advanced, the practical application of IT and best practices in GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) is woefully absent. Talk of “business continuity” (BC) is usually narrowly focused on only certain pieces of a business supply-chain or data assets. In a country so prone to earthquakes, it makes me wonder how many organizations (large and small) would be able to truly survive the “big quake” if it finally strikes.
Proactive, not reactive
Business Intelligence (BI) is not just about performance management, it is about creating better transparency and accountability inside the corporation. It is about ensuring the survivability of the enterprise and keeping forever agile and poised to glean competitive advantage from changes in the marketplace. It is about being proactive and not just reactive. BI allows a company to prepare for major change or crisis before they happen.
BI not only gives a company competitive advantage, it often means whether or not a company can survive when a major crisis hits.
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William Laurent is a world recognized consultant, educator, lecturer, and writer involved, for almost 20 years, in Business Intelligence and Governance. He offers training to both Japanese and U.S. firms in business intelligence to help them run more intelligently.
In his Business Excellence training, he examines how BI ties into and supports corporate governance and business continuity which can be specifically targeted to individual corporations and industries.
For more information about the Business Excellence training curriculum for companies, e-mail us at: [email protected] OR [email protected].
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