Weathering The Storm With Business Intelligence

Top-performing companies are 15 times more likely to apply analytics to strategic decisions than their underperforming peers.

This from a new IBM study on the role information-based decision making is playing in successful business strategies during these tough economic times.

Top performers were also 22 times more prepared to challenge the status quo in their organizations, rethink their current strategies and business processes, and aggressively apply and act on new insights derived from analytics.

The study also found that top performers were six times more likely to entrust a broader base of employees with greater authority to make decisions and act on insights.

Entitled “Breaking Away With Business Analytics and Optimization,” the study was based on a blind survey of nearly 400 business executives globally, who rated their businesses versus their peers.

It was published by the IBM Institute for Business Value and is available here.

As part of the analysis, IBM consultants determined that top-performing organizations are able to more fully exploit business analytics for competitive advantage.

The study also revealed that having superior data governance — assuring that data definitions were clear, relevant and accepted — is critical to success for the top performers.

In fact, by a factor of three to one, the study found that top performers were much more sophisticated in their approach to governing organizational information relative to lower performing companies (42 percent versus 14 percent).

IBM itself is actually one of the leading users of analytics in the industry.

Our own Blue Insight initiative is a cloud computing environment that will soon be gathering information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte and helping IBM sales and marketing teams to better predict which products and services will deliver the most value to our clients.

Today, at 3 PM EST, check in with the IBM New Intelligence Video studio to learn more about this study and about how IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization Global Business Services organization may be able to help your company improve its decision making with actionable insight.