Spending More? As with the rest of the economy, IT spending has certainly reduced from it’s peak a few years ago, however it is on the rise again with Gartner predicting IT spend in 2012 to rise by 5.2% (excluding exchange rate fluctuations), across all sectors with the exception of spending in public/governmental sector which will shrink by 0.8%. What is particularly interesting is that small and medium sized businesses are those that are looking to increase their spend through to the end of 2016.
Business Intelligence, Management Information, Data Analytics and Data Warehousing have been business buzzwords for some time but more and more organisations are recognising the value and opportunities that exist in the data that they already have or already collect. This does however have to be done sensitively, particularly when using personal information (a powerful example of this need is the example of how US retailer Target uses its data to identify pregnant women through their buying habits (New York Times Article). The old saying about gaining a single version of the truth is very much a driver for the implementation of a data warehouse…If you or others within your organisation are still saying things like “Well if I had the data to know then we could …”, or “Well those aren’t the figures that I have”, then you really need to look at your Business Intelligence Strategy.