In order for a business to make informed decisions, the data within that organization must be utilized—or exploited—to its fullest extent. Eddie Short, global head of business intelligence (BI) and information management at Capgemini, has spent his career building a reputation as a successful leader with expertise in BI, business process management and integration, e-business and IT strategy, compliance, customer resource management and enterprise content management. Short is leading Capgemini's client work in creating intelligent businesses by providing organizations with the ability to plan effectively and efficiently to provide the right information at the right time across the enterprise.

Eddie Short, vice president, Business Information Management, Capgemini UK, says the effective use of data is essential in today's business world.

Short recently shared with Teradata Magazine his thoughts on the need for information exploitation.

Q Let's start by defining what you mean by the term "information exploitation."

A For me, it's about getting real business outcomes from data and information that your business has—business outcomes such as driving improved measurable results and delivering a significant increase in revenue from opportunities such as cross-sales or stopping revenue leakage. Opportunities like those might be missed without exploiting information and leveraging it within an organization. It's really about driving a positive change in the performance of your business.

The word "exploitation" is purposeful because most organizations aren't leveraging the right data and haven't got a grip on all the data available because they're dealing with too many versions of the truth. To drive real business outcomes, an organization must be able to thoroughly grasp its data, information, insight and intelligence. Data on its own is of limited value, but it's also the starting point. Information is data that's under control—the company has one comprehensive, reliable, up-to-date version of the truth, drawn from its data. From that information, an organization can then gain insight into its business, and from there an organization can make intelligent decisions that drive those positive changes.

Q If the problem of getting the most value from information comes from being overwhelmed by too much data, what is the solution? Surely not less data?

A Well, to use a literary allusion, in Samuel Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a phrase about the ocean: "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."

Many organizations find themselves in a "data, data everywhere" situation; they might be drowning in data, but yet they don't even have a life raft of information to help them get where they want to go.

In other words, many organizations are data rich but information poor. They have data coming in from various systems and from Web sites; they collect data to meet compliance and regulation requirements; they have data from unscripted sources and documents and so on.

So, the problem organizations face isn't a question of having enough data; it's having so much that the challenge becomes filtering the data down into information and insights that enable effective decision making to drive better results.

Q So, how can enterprises use technology to get the most information and insight out of data without again being overwhelmed?

A First of all, one version of the truth is a necessity. And at the very minimum, technology must help organizations get to that by bringing together various sources of data, profiling it and cleaning it, so that the enterprise has a trusted source of data and information.

This is what you get with a good [data] warehouse solution like Teradata, and I do consider this a starting point for truly exploiting organizational information to drive business decision making and results.

After that, technology can help organizations drive insights from that information—insights such as problems and opportunities within the business.

Q What cultural changes must enterprises make to truly understand how to get the most out of their data?

A There is a culture in many organizations that decision making should come from the gut and not the head, but smart organizations are more analytical. There will always be a place for instinct and flashes of insight, but the truth is that 99 percent of day-to-day decisions need to be analytically driven.

So, there's a mentality that people don't always want to trust what their business systems are telling them, so they build their own version of truth. That's why it's important to help people come to the conclusion that the technology is going to provide correct information—if that information is pulled from one clean version of the data—even if that information doesn't always match the mental model of what you initially thought that information or insight would be.

It's not sustainable in our 21st-century economy to be so queasy about working with data and analysis of that data, because information and insight from data is where executives can find opportunities and also recognize and proactively manage challenges. What's more, these kinds of decisions have to be made much more quickly now, sometimes even in minutes. Even five years ago, executives could take a few days to respond to challenges and opportunities, but now a few days is often far too long to make business decisions.

Additionally, compliance and regulatory requirements demand organizational transparency, and the only way to confidently deliver that is with one version of the truth pulled from clean, accurate, up-to-date data.

Q What are the benefits of information exploitation?

A Some of the world's leading companies—which are discussed in the white paper "Harnessing the Power of an Organisation's Information"—are the ones who have taken information exploitation to a higher art. Information exploitation drives what they do on a day-to-day basis. I'll put a stake in the ground and say that in an environment like this, larger companies cannot have the agility to compete without exploiting their information effectively in their organizations.

Q What are the challenges of information exploitation?

A Most businesses have traditionally been built around people, processes and technology. And those elements are necessary and fine. But information is really what drives decisions in today's business environment, so I think it's necessary to up the traditional three fundamentals of business to four fundamentals to create an operating model for a business: information, people, processes and technology.

And that is a fundamental change in the way people design their business systems. But I've found that once you have a conversation about this with business leaders, they quickly get the need for this change—that information must be core. It's a statement, in a way, of the obvious but one that most organizations have put off truly addressing. That's challenge number one.

Challenge number two is something we've already discussed a bit—getting people to trust in the value of analysis of data to a degree that leads to behavioral changes of actually using data-driven analysis of information as the foundation for making decisions nimbly, finding opportunities and proactively dealing with challenges.

But the truth is that the best businesses in the world are moving from approaching technology as just applications to technology as a source for information that inspires insight and action.

Q How does information exploitation support the ideal of active enterprise intelligence?

A They're rather like yin and yang! You can't have information exploitation without active enterprise intelligence, and vice versa. It's crucial to invest in the right technology platform for information exploitation and active enterprise intelligence to happen. And without a platform like Teradata, your organization simply can't get to the right level of platform to exploit information and have active enterprise intelligence. That's because to achieve either, you need much more than an executive or management tool—you need an enterprise-wide system, which is the only kind of solution, actually, that will inspire the trust and behavioral changes we've talked about that are necessary for this kind of proactive, nimble decision-making environment.

Many organizations have invested in data warehousing, but many of those have static data warehousing solutions that are application-driven and too simplistic, as opposed to solutions that support dynamically changing real-world business environments. Teradata sets the bar of what a data warehouse solution should be—an information-centric partner that enables an organization to get more out of a data warehouse than what it puts in. With Teradata, it's really data that goes in � but information and insight emerge to drive actionable, nimble, enterprise-wide decision making founded on one version of organizational truth. T

Sharon Short is a freelance writer who specializes in high-tech topics.

Photograph courtesy of Capgemini.

Teradata Magazine-June 2007