The Value of Business Intelligence

Posted by Mark Brousseau

An interesting article from ComputerWeekly.com on the value of document management:

Information management to deliver real value to businesses

Author: Joe O'Halloran

Posted: 14:32 11 Aug 2008
Topics: Data Management Business Intelligence Compliance

Information management (IM) solutions are moving to the centre of IT strategies as a way of driving IT and business alignment and delivering real and visible value to the business, according to a recent survey from Forrester research.

The market analyst believes that the driver for such a move is the fact that wherever there is a hot growth market in IT, there will be plenty of IT consultants, systems integrators, and managed services providers to help architect, plan, implement, and manage the solution.

After surveying vendors of both IM software and services to assess the size of the IM services market, Forrester expects the global information services market to grow from its present value of $7.9 billion to $10.9 billion by 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.2%.

Business intelligence (BI) and business performance solutions will likely dominate this spend, although Forrester adds that the information strategy segment will see the fastest growth throughout the forecast period.

Data warehouse services should also witness strong growth over the next two years as with greater interest in and deployment of BI and BPS solutions, the requirements for data warehouses to store all of the data should also grow commensurately. On a long term basis, data warehouses will likely start to take over some of the functions typically found in the data management segment and also require more consulting and integration services.

Forrester also thinks that content management and portal services should witness high growth in 2009. It says the content management market has consistently underperformed the high expectations set for it and that even though the promise of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions has never really been delivered by the software providers, in those cases where heavy ECM solutions have failed, portals are beginning to deliver. Some organisations are beginning to use portals as their ad hoc ECM solution, and Forrester predicts that this trend will accelerate in 2009.

Forrester advises firms to define clearly and information management services strategy and adhere to it, ensuring that it can take the company forward, should the current focus segment start to merge with another. It adds that firms should assess core competencies as part of the strategic due diligence in defining a strategy, put them into context with the total market opportunity, and balance a portfolio of new areas and old areas.

Are business intelligence intelligence solutions playing a more central role in your enterprise IT planning? Post your comment below.