'5 Must Haves in your Information Strategy during Challenging times'

In today's challenging business environment and economic woes, budgets are tight with no room for risk in today's businesses. The criticality for success, and even business survival, has become more important than ever. The need to leverage each opportunity, maximize value from every available resource and closely track operations within an increasingly competitive landscape is stronger than ever. This means meaningful, real-time information must be at the forefront for CIOs and their businesses to enable maximum business value.

In an environment where timely and meaningful information is critical for survival and resources are severely limited, it is very important for organizations to focus on the following five strategies to help them meet the growing information needs of their users while achieving better cost and time returns. Below are five 'must haves' in the CIO's information management strategy that will help make actionable information available to all stakeholders while minimizing cost, time and IT overhead.

1. Flexible Reporting
Speed and quality of decision-making depends on the degree of control and flexibility that decision makers have over the information presented. They should be able to interact with, modify and extend the information depending on their dynamic information needs without any dependence on IT.

2. Real-time and On-demand Analysis
To gain deeper insights into business situations, decision makers need to be able to analyze data without the limits of prior aggregation. And to make that possible, one must have access to 'here and now' information through self-serve analysis. For instance, if a plant manager needs to review productivity by day or hour instead of by month or week, he should be able to drill down all the way to raw data on production rather than be limited by monthly or weekly aggregated data. If the time taken to make analyzable data available is too long, the dynamics may change making the information itself irrelevant.

3. Focus on ALL elements of Cost of Ownership
While considering cost of ownership, CIOs should look at minimizing every component. Typically, 80% of the cost comprises implementation, hardware and software infrastructure, maintenance, training and consulting services costs, etc. For example, a solution that requires minimal training and enables even novices to use it with basic orientation lowers implementation cost and time. Or a solution that leverages desktop computing infrastructure and does not use server computing resources, minimizes hardware and software investments.

4. Achieve 'Time to value' in Days
To address today's needs, it is important for CIOs to challenge the paradigm of 'Time to Value,' which is weeks and sometimes even months. What is required instead is to be able to begin delivering value in days. A short 'time to value' translates into early accrual of business value, lower costs and new opportunities.

5. Achieve ROI in Weeks
A Computer Economics study indicates that of 200 enterprises surveyed, over 50% did not achieve positive ROI from their BI implementations even two years after implementation^*.

This presents an unacceptable scenario in today's environment, which mandates not only a positive return but also that it should be achieved in 'weeks' instead of 'months' or 'years'. To achieve an aggressive ROI goal of weeks, it is essential that 'must-haves' 3 and 4 above are achieved.

With challenges times, come new opportunities. These five 'must haves' provide an effective guideline to enable CIOs help their businesses take advantage of these opportunities by providing meaningful information to users, while delivering accelerated value and achieving cost leadership.

^*Computer Economics, Business Intelligence Adoption Trends and Economic Experiences, 2008