What About the Solutions Promising Increased Productivity?

How can businesses be data rich but information poor and knowledge starved when there are so many IT solutions on the market today promising to increase productivity and effectiveness?

This begins with the fact that many business processes have been automated to some degree, and so almost every action, non-action, or other aspect of a business procedure is recorded and stored. This, however, is only the first step to gaining benefit from the IT infrastructure that supports this. When we look at real-time business intelligence software, software that is usually marketed to help users “make sense” of their piles of data, most of what is available tends to simply present data, rather than provide analysis tools to help users understand the data.

Since information must be relevant to be useful to decision makers in problem solving, and since IT will generally not know what is relevant to specific business leaders, collaboration must take place. Business decision makers want more than just the raw data from transaction processing systems, and they must effectively communicate this during the planning stages of an IT infrastructure implementation.

Even when business leaders get this step correct and are able to communicate to IT properly about what their team’s information needs are, there are two more high level steps that must be taken; organizational change and adequate training.

When new IT is introduced, studies have shown that users, at first, resist the new technology. It has been said that this is simply due to the existence of old habits. There will always be a learning curve with new technology, so employees may be slower at first with the new technology, and thus, may quickly revert to the “old way” if time constraints prove too tight for a given task. This is one place where sufficient training and organizational change is necessary. Training, and temporarily adjusted deadlines may be required to ensure adoption of the new technology. In some cases, entire business and administrative processes may need to be re-worked to compliment the technology.

The other reason software solutions may not be delivering on their productivity promise is because of a lack of data integrity. Even if a firm has proper data management in place, including user and business support and organizational alignment, they still contend with data integrity and accuracy. In an article on silicon.com it was mentioned that "The sheer quantity means you are never really able to grade the quality of the information at the organization’s disposal."

When users must question the integrity of data, they may waste immense amounts of time gathering additional reports for comparison purposes. IT systems can lack proper integration and ability to consolidate their specific solution with the enterprise’s other systems. As an article on cable360.net suggests, the volume of disparate, possibly inaccurate data that is presented to operational leaders for decision making is huge. They imply that these managers have difficulty in pinpointing the useful data.