Any predictions about the future and particularly given the speed at which technology and business practice is changing, is purely speculative. In this article I attempt to put my own perspective of the future risks and opportunities in this area.

The first major development I expect is that business intelligence as a concept will have greater profile and influence over the average business structure. The entrance of competitors and the need to constantly revise practice in line with new trends means that without good business intelligence, firms will be hampered in the extent to which they can make viable ventures.

It is a very imprudent manager indeed who fails to plan for the expansion of business intelligence. Those firms that fail in this endeavor will continue to lose customers and money. If they are not ultimately driven out of business, they will provide a cautionary tale for those who ignore business advice.

Information technology has democratized communication systems. The growth of social media has enabled end users to participate in the assessment and general direction of the brand. It is only a matter of time before decision makers realize that the customer will have to be involved in running the organizations. A case in point is how airlines have been forced to provide better facilities for people with disabilities due to a concerted publicity campaign by ordinary members of the public. One of the methods used to publicize this cause were social networking sites.

There will also be specific developments within the business intelligence technology such as the creation of bespoke packages to deal with the increase in demand and the diversity of objectives from each of the organizations. Already individual companies are in the process of defining their requirements for the future. It is highly likely that the next step would be to commission these InfoTech services. It might also be that the technology will start specializing by sector or business types and that generic technology will fall out of fashion.

Business intelligence is also likely to foster a new climate of collegiate working whereby management information is no longer just restricted to the senior executives but can also find its way down to the end users who are then able to determine how it can be useful to them in their day to day work. The utopia is that all customers and employees feedback to managers. This would make them stakeholders and would presumably develop brand loyalty.

Of course there is concern about the risk that technology will completely override human discretion and companies will be further de-personalized. This is a risk that every developing organization faces. However given the popularity of new media connectivity, it is likely that the customers will not mind having digital interaction with businesses.

Customers are no longer willing to go into profligate spending based on unsustainable credit. There have been many bankruptcies both personal and institutional. The darkened mood of the consumers makes them prefer saving to spending.

Unemployment has virtually depleted the reserves of disposable income that so defined the age of the boom and burst. This article aims to ask the question as to whether business intelligence should act as a reactive or even defensive mechanism to cope with fluctuating economic situations.

The sources of business intelligence can be both local and industry wide. Even internationally there are mechanisms to disseminate useful data about what has happened and what is likely to happen. Recessions and periods of austerity are not new to us. In the same way that a business can predict that sales are likely to pick up during the Christmas festivities, an economy can predict that where it is supported by vast amounts of dubious credit, the economy will fall at some stage.

Why is it then the people seemed to have been caught by surprise? The banking crisis’s that plagued the globe were talked about in the most awestruck tones as if people had never had of banks failing. Governments reacted with horror at the rising unemployment figures as if they had never had unemployment before.

The biggest victims were individuals and small businesses which generally do not have very sophisticated business intelligence systems but were never too big to fail. They did not have the ability to pressure governments into giving them crisis loans or bail-out money. All they did was to put up and if they went down, the entrepreneurs would wait and give it another go when the climate improved.

Does it have to be this way all the time? One would hope that many business people have learned the lessons of the global downturn and if it next happens (as it surely will), they are better prepared. Sadly history tells us that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.

Nevertheless even at this time of a recession firms can look at business intelligence as a means of mitigating some of the more devastating consequences of a difficult economy. For example some of the supermarkets have started offering quite a lot of budget in-house items which tend to cost much less than the branded items.

This was based on market intelligence gleaned from the buying patterns of their customers during the global recession. Credit card companies also scaled back on their lending criteria on the basis that their customer pool had an altered income and spending profile. That is the essence of using market intelligence to cope with market pressures.

If your organization is unable to set up a program for identifying and resolving contractual issues even before they arise, then you will almost certainly make a bad decision that will end up negatively impacting on your company. This article will go over some of the general principles and issues that could possibly be considered as part of a business IT project.

There needs to be agreement about dispute resolution. Of course you are hoping that your IT service provider will not give you causes to run after them or to doubt their professionalism but nevertheless you need to be aware that these things happen all the time.

One method can be to set up contracts that are paid on completion of a certain aspect of the project or to even agree penalties for not doing work up to standards. It is better to avoid the money back guarantee schemes because they are usually built on false hopes.

It is also very important to establish who is going to take responsibility for the project. This might involve meeting the staff and interviewing them individually to check their credentials and references. It pays to be weary of the company that double outsources after you have given them a contract.

You might want to make it a specific aspect of the contract that no further outsourcing is allowed other than the relationship between you and the provider. Double outsourcing creates control issues and will dilute accountability.

Where possible try to look at the services that they propose to use. It might be possible to check their software providers. This information can be cross checked against your own intelligence and you might be in a position to object to certain contracts which violate the law or even have a bad reputation when it comes to providing business IT solutions. There is possibility of negotiating discounts if you are able to direct the provider to certain other contacts of yours which can facilitate their work.

Experience will have a role to play in the quality of the work output and the ease with which your contractor can embed within your organization. If they have worked for a similar organization to yours or an industry related to yours, there are advantages that can be transferred to your working relationships. Make sure that any claims about experience are checked and substantiated. You also need to coax the provider into informing you if there are any problems that they envisage working for you so that you can resolve them even before they start work.

Finally it is important to appraise yourself about the important contractual issues such as the costs, the methods of payment and the schedule of payments to ensure that you are not being taken advantage of. Once you explore all the issues, then the business IT project is ready to begin.

Almost everyone is well aware of the fact that the IT is capable of making maintainable and sustainable competitive benefits. In the business arena, the IT is used through value chain of activities that facilitates the business organization to control and optimize the operational functions for effortless decision making process.

The IT is strategic in it’s skill by building the concept of “Value Chain” in a business o0rganization through generic value activities that are interdependent of each other. This chain comprises elements like customers, suppliers, finance, production, etc. There is a connection between these activities which makes it a value chain. These value chain activities as well as the product’s physical parts and processing is altered either by product differentiation or cutting the costs of the value activities. The IT on the whole even transforms the speed of competition.

The value of the company can be added by the IT either by increasing revenue or reduction in costs. The potential of the IT of adding value to the business firm is very different from being the source of the sustainable competitiveness.

Though, the IT’s ability to be a source of the sustainable competitive advantages is disputed and based on assumptions. The assumptions result in two theories. The correlation between IT and the sustainable competitive benefit is studied by one theory called as the Create capture and Keep paradigm. This basically relies on swapping the costs of the customers.

This theory got replaced by a resource based theory that explicates the company’s potential to use the IT to influence the basic resources as a plus and also source of the sustainable competitive edge. In this theory, when the company possesses similar resources or capability, which the other competitor company doesn’t posses, then the same constitutes as the source of the competitive edge.

But the problem is that, if the resources are constant, then it will be a great disadvantage at the cost of the company. So the same will not make a sustainable competitive edge. Simply by imitation of the IT resources of the successful company without social complexity or ambiguity might also make a sustainable competitive edge.

In any kind of organization, the IT is a potential source of competitive edge in these five methods given below:

• When the supplier is in a good position and the IT is essential and unique for the end users, then the costs borne by the consumers will be switched
• When a technology becomes a proprietary technology
• When the capital Investment in the IT enabled resource increases
• For building the IT application, some technical skills are needed
• When the managerial skills are developed for exploiting and understanding the IT application for increasing the business operations

Each and every kind of information in the firm can get positive results and has the potential to get sustainable competitive edge if you observe the following steps:

1. Assessing the potential and the existing information intensity of the process and product
2. Evaluating the probable impact of the IT on the firm
3. Identifying the rank of the activities that affects the IT first
4. Measuring how the IT can bring new business
5. Generating the action plan by taking advantages of IT

It is not just one supporting system, but also a perfect thought process contributing substantial edge, effects and the implications in the business goals.

However this view is rather old fashioned thinking. Agricultural enterprises can range from the small scale subsistence farms to large commercial firms that require huge investment and complex operations. Even for those that are presently small scale, it is advisable to consider up-scaling on the basis that the more technological advanced a farm is, the more likely it is to have large scale customers who pay well.

What then are the practical applications of technology in agriculture ?  The increased mechanization of agriculture means that computers and other technology can be used to either replace human activity in whole or to replace certain aspects of human activity or even to merely complement the other traditional methods of farming. At a time when farmers are encouraged to mechanize, thereby reaping the benefits of improved efficiency and adding value to their products, the role of InfoTech will increase in this sector. The equipment that is being used will become more efficient and will tie-in with the more modern farms.

Modern farms are not just about producing crops or rearing animals. They can have quite complex human resource systems, finance and operations. They would then resemble any other business and would likewise need similar Information Technology programs. Take for example a ranch owner who regularly supplies to major supermarkets; the ability to control stock and delivery times as well as the importance of ensuring consistent quality will mean that modern technology will be invaluable. The issues of finance, human resource management and even communication mean that the farm will have to have some form of business IT model. The level of sophistication will depend on the type of farm and the needs of the farmer.

The only downside is that the majority of farmers in the world come from the developing countries where they have very limited scope to grow. They tend to be subsistence farmers with extremely limited income. There is also the problem of lack of awareness and the fear of new technology. It is even doubtful whether such attempts to create technology within a basic industry are viable. The costs of creating a whole business information technology model may by far outweigh any returns that such a farm can realistically obtain.

En conclusion I would argue that agriculture has to behave like other industries if it is to experience the rapid development that those industries have experienced over the last three decades. The traditional methods of farming still have a role to play but in terms of getting really big returns, the only way is to modernize. This transformation will require InfoTech conceptualization and applications, and farmers ought to prepare themselves for this resource.

Even before it became a business concept that is we there were applications of business performance in a non-office environment. For examples Tzu framed it in terms of understanding the relative weaknesses of the opponent and competitor.

This understanding of business performance management was particularly useful when undertaking warfare. It would involve the inversion of the formula so that one could examine their own organization and apply the same rigorous standards that they would apply to an enemy. It still involved the essential ingredients of data gathering which was then deciphered and turned into practical information.

Prior to the full development of information technology, organizational decisions were more often than not arising out of gut instinct rather than scientific evidence. This could lead to excellent decisions or it could lead to horrendous decisions but there was no systematic or consistent means of analyzing the critical factors for making decisions. It was not because of a lack of management information. In fact information was manually being collated on a very large scale involving vast numbers of staff. However this information was not in a compact or easily accessible format and therefore managers would find it inconvenient to make short term decisions based on it.

With the advent of information technology it was now possible to process vast amounts of data and disseminates it to a very wide spectrum of people. Pivotal table principles allowed individual managers to select only that portion of the management data that applied to them. This allowed the decisions makers to identify patterns of working. A correlation between management information and business performance management was established and gradually it was scaled up to a full profession.

In the late 1980S business writers began to seek new terminology to describe the process of managing organizations. As is often the case, professional bodies were established and contracting firms started to offer services on an outsourcing basis. At that point internal business managers were rather awestruck by some of the terminology and the concepts that were being put forward.

Business performance management then went through a phase where it was just like any other fad. All sorts of wild theories would be created and discredited. Eventually the practice was applied to both small and large organizations. As the results started to come in, there was a process of natural selection where the best theories would be adopted by the most successful companies while the unconvincing ones were left to die a natural death.

These days performance management is embedded in all business practice. It has been a standard addition to the manager’s toolkit and is consistently visible within any management training or recruitment programs.

However there are dangers in this approach. If responsibility for business equity is shelved onto accountancy teams, other sections will not have an understanding of how their activities can lead to the diminishing or increase in business equity. Ideally everyone should understand their role in developing and maintaining business equity.

The role of individual employees
Individual employees will add value to the company by way of producing goods and service s for sale after mobilizing the inputs. Each person needs to take responsibility to ensure that they do their work to the best of their ability and to the specification that was given to them at the start of their contract. After all if the organization is to collapse, they will be the ones losing their jobs whilst trying to negotiate with unsympathetic venture capitalists. Where there is a need to appraise the company, local members of staff need to cooperate by providing accurate and timely management information in order to facilitate the quick award of funding to the firm.

The Role of the Corporate Finance Team
The corporate finance team is responsible for coordinating all efforts to obtain funding for business projects. Among these sources of funding will be business equity. They will need to assess that the company’s business equity levels are measured, quantified and documented. Furthermore they will be at the forefront of ensuring that in any business deal, the company business equity is not sold way below the market price.

They also need to raise management information for senior managers, prepare reports for potential investors and will be at the forefront of all negotiations. There is also an important role to sensitize the general workforce and senior managers about some aspects of accounting for business equity which may be relevant to their line of work.

The Role of Senior Management Executives
Senior executives will control the overall strategy of the company. If they are not versed with the basic concepts of business equity, they might make management decisions that are inappropriate in terms of trying to build a good business equity portfolio.

Management should also ensure that all parts of the business are aware of the existence of business equity and that all business functions are carried out bearing this in mind the need to maximize business equity. Finally they will be making the final decisions as to whether to agree to any investment proposal so it is imperative that they are quite well versed with the concepts of business equity.

Conclusion
As we can see from the above discussion, everyone working in an organization needs to ensure that they understand that business equity represents the value of their organization and that as they carry out each of their roles, they need to ensure that they consider the ramifications on this metric.

These survivors are the ones who will build the empire going forward, so if you look at it, from a global perspective this stage is very critical, as you see new products will come in, along with products the business will come and along with business, jobs will come in too.

In such times, one needs to very precarious while starting off with some form of business. There are a lot of things that come to your mind when you either setting up a business or expanding the business. However; the top priority and the hard to gain for both these things are finances. Most of the business starts off and then end in couple of years with the lack of finance.

What is the need of the hour?
In all the crisis and economic upheaval, one of the best source of gaining access to finance is factoring. In fact if you look at the history of factoring you will realize that it has been in practice for almost over 1000 years now. It has been used during the Roman Era, wherein when the merchants from Rome used to extend credit to customers, the factors at that point of time would advance funds, so that they can use it in place of the future payments which they are in receipt of. Later on this process was used by far flung places like America and Canada.

Various sources of financing:
There are three main ways to provide finance to business.

• Acquiring debt
• Sale of capital in form equity or venture
• Be the master – Do it yourself

However, as of now the debt option is still allowed to certain companies. However; with the economic turmoil happening around the world it is very possible that there can be a curb on this option.

The second one Venture or equity capital is also available to a few limited companies, but these options are also getting narrowed down as they are becoming very particular about the kind venture or business they are planning to invest in. The biggest drawback or disadvantage is that when you get finances in the form of selling equity you tend to lose the ownership of the shares instead the ownership of the shares sold will lie with the owner who buys the shares.

Apart from raising the needed capital from personal funds or applying for business loans from banks, one of the better ways of raising funds is via trade factoring. In fact in this case, with respect to venture capital the ownership will still remain with you as you are the one who is factoring yourself. Factoring, mainly refer as Invoice Factoring or some as Trade Factoring , helps provide working capital especially when SME does not have sufficient funds to roll over when receiving large purchase order.

It act an immediate cash flow obtain from financial institution, in exchange of invoices to be paid by your client, of which you’ll be delivering the goods or services to the client. This is ideally helpful for all the business owners who are able to produce consistent sale of goods be it in terms of product or service with no compromise on the quality of the same as desired by the customers.

Get ready :
You should have all the financial statements ready and have an effective business plan which should include the purpose, revenue and expense of your company. All personal financial reports should be collected. After all, your creditor will need to make sure that you will be able return back their money, once they have provided you with the loan.

The financial institution will also want to know how you are going to use the loan amount and if you are a small business owner, you will most probably be asked to put collateral. Assets like land, vehicle or equipment can be used as collateral or security. This is because if you fail to repay the loan amount, then your creditors will sell your asset to get their money back.

Instructions :
The first step towards applying for a small business loan is to have all the paperwork including financial statements, cover letter along with purpose of applying for the loan. Your creditor will review and prioritize your application based on your presentation only. It would be wise not to apply to a single creditor only. All financial institutions have different upfront costs and loan rates and therefore, thorough online and offline research is recommended.

The next big thing is to fill out your business loan application completely. Along with the application, you should also attach a cover sheet on which all your company’s vital information should be written. Getting some recommendation letters can also help you in getting the loan faster and easier.

The final step :
After several hours of organizing and complying the paperwork, compare the costs and settle on the best financial institution as per your budget, requirements and preferences. This may seem to be a little bit difficult, but with the right knowledge and resources, the entire process will be made much easier than expected.

If you follow all these steps and take care of all these things, you can be sure that your business loan application is at least not thrown away in the dustbin. Even if some lenders send back your application to you, this does not mean that your application has been rejected. They may just need to know more about your company and your financial information.

One of those tools will have to be Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). The purpose of this article is to provide a generalized framework in which the data skimmed online can be processed and eventually embedded within the day to day infrastructure of a business.

Of course, the level of detail, investment and sophistication will vary between a small firm and the multinational organization. However the basic concepts still remain the same.

The key difference between OLAP and other data collation mechanism is that it undertakes an approach that is simultaneous navigational, hierarchical and relational. This is a far more comprehensive method than merely examining particular strands and informational patterns. If used correctly, it can enable large-scale interpretation of vast amounts of discrete and varied pieces of business intelligence into a technically relevant set of causes and effects.

In other wards the decision maker is enabled to gather seemingly unrelated pieces of information and thereby create a story that will ultimately translate into profits for the business. Often the challenge for a business decision making process is not that there is not enough information or that it is not even accurate. No, the real challenge does know what the information means for you and your people within the organization. Online Analytical Processing is just one way of making things way simpler.

It goes without saying that there will inevitably raise certain intrinsic problems where the business is using complex systems to resolve even more complex questions. One of them is accuracy: by its very nature the use of often seemingly remote data involves compromise by way of aggregates and assumptions. The thinking behind these assumptions and the criteria for selective reporting in making predictive analysis has to undergo very stringent scrutiny otherwise one single misjudgment could end up producing increasingly inaccurate data. Decisions based on bad information are almost always bad decisions.

The second problem is concerned with the manageability of the database system once it has evolved. The effective use of business intelligence requires that managers ought to be able to access the analytical process tool data on a fairly regular basis. This is not a big problem if the firm is fairly straightforward. However for the more complex business organizations, there will be practical concerns about access and maintenance.

In conclusion it would be arguable that online analytical processing vastly improves the effectiveness of business intelligence by extending the variety of sources of information and collating them in such a way as to make sense to the frontline and the key decision makers. It also addresses some of the more bureaucratic bottlenecks commonly associated with the processing of complex data. It would therefore be very shortsighted to fail to include OLAP within the mix of systems and tools that are used to collect and analysis in business intelligence modules.

These include but are not limited to operational performance management (OPM), business performance optimization (BPO), corporate performance management (CPA) and enterprise performance management (EPM). Despite the difference both operate on one principle which attempts to increase the efficiency and profitability of the organization right up to the optimum level.

In order to achieve this aim, the organization has to muster all its resources whether it is human capital or technology aids with the overriding aim of reducing costs, increasing output and growing profits. The challenge is getting all departments to understand their work in times of increasing efficiency and profitability. Many of them will have vested interests and their own agendas. The institutional culture that you have encouraged in your company will also have an impact in terms of the extent to which staff members are willing to join your efforts at performance management.

Evidence shows that performance management process does go hand in hand with change management. In order to prioritize the company’s core objective, there will have to be significant period of organizational change. Where there is change culture resistance is not far off. It will take a lot of work to get the whole organization to work in sync. The larger the organization the greater the complexity of effecting change.

Performance management by its very nature seeks to create minimum performance standards. It can create rewards and sanctions depending on the level of compliance. The strategic nature of its operations means that it often takes precedence over the day to day routine. It also creates a fear of management as people may believe that their jobs are being restructured and will eventually disappear from the payroll.

Performance management is a process and not just an incident. It is imperative that there is a continuous assessment in order to ensure that the changes and performance standards are not a one-off administered in haste but part of a well planned strategy to improve performance. Staff members should be encouraged to record the results of their own work and review their own performance in line with the standards that have been set.

There is always a risk that business performance management is created and supervised as a top-down activity. This is an approach that is likely to attract the stiffest resistance from members of staff who may feel that they are being dictated to by management. Rather efforts should be made to ensure that even the lowest employee believes that performance management is in their best interests. If they are to do well then the rewards will go to them in terms of promotion and better conditions.

Human beings will be at the heart of any business IT project. They will be the working capital that ensures it is commissioned and at the end that it is used for the purpose for which it was commissioned. They will bring their own judgments, skills and failings to the project and could ultimately bring it down.

There is no way of controlling human influence in a comprehensive manner. What managers tend to do is to attempt influence employee action using the various management incentives and sanctions available to them. However this does not always work and could ultimately push the employees even further away from their managers. The basic tenets of good management practice can still apply here. Things such as supervision and reward schemes can counter some of the more negative reactions to new technology.

Where the project has been outsourced, the personnel issues are compounded by the fact the in-house managers really have very limited control on external staff. They will have entered binding contracts with their parent organizations and will really be free to do as they please. They also bring with them their own way of working that may not fit in with the company philosophy. Furthermore they do not bear direct responsibility for things when they go wrong and they have to use faulty technology. This means that they have even less incentive to get it right the first time.

This leads us on to the issue of accountability. This is particularly the case where there is a large organization with different people working on different projects all feeding into one big IT group. This can lead people to view themselves as separate parts of an entity leading to isolation and inconsistencies in practice. Even where problems are being resolved there is no one person who coordinates strategy. Any attempts to get some type of responsibility descend into a blame game. People start going off sick with stress and avoiding the senior managers.

However the biggest cause of failure has to be planning. Many failing organizations have a conceptual idea of what they would like out of their IT project but they will not have detailed plans as to how they are going to achieve the objectives. Commissioning will often be based on the personal whims of a particular manager rather than being an overall long term business strategy. Issues will be simplified with the attitude that they can deal with whatever problems arise on an adhoc basis. Therefore without proper planning the project is almost certainly doomed to fail.

There is a debate to be had about whether the government should be involved anyway. However the limits of this article do not allow for such extensive debate. Needless to say there is a general consensus that the Information Technology systems existing in many healthcare systems across the world are quite expensive and often do not meet the needs of the end users.

There have been various examples of government departments or private companies commissioning large business IT systems to administer healthcare only to later discover that these are either inappropriate or way over budget. The government sectors are particularly notorious for this. They get sold on by smooth sales people who juggle management speak for the benefit of bored managers.

Just to get an easy life, the IT system is commissioned anyway. This is despite some opposition from a lower ranked employee who, knowing how the business works on a day to day basis, will already have worked out that the new IT systems will not be able to deliver the kind of service that is required. When that employee begins to experience problems with the IT system, they are reprimanded for being resistant to change.

Once the complaints grow then the IT system is temporarily withdrawn until further investigation. Either the whole thing will be shelved or the company will join the vicious cycle of organizations that have to update or replace inappropriate technology systems.

This is the type of scenario that is played out like some tragedy over and over again. For some this is costly and unacceptable in such a sensitive industry that affects the personal lives of millions of people. Where it is government funded, this sort of business IT mismanagement takes resources away from other critical activities and reduces the scope of coverage when attempting to deliver healthcare services. What then is the solution for preventing such problems or dealing with them once they have overcome?

One of the more persuasive suggestions is that all stakeholders should be involved in selecting new information technology. There will be a divergence of need between a clinician, an administrator, a senior manager and a patient. Even the IT technician will have their own perspective as to what needs to work. Rather than selectively consult with just one among the many groups, it is far better to consult with them all. It might take a bit longer than would normally be required but the end result is that healthcare IT systems will be durable and appropriate to the people who use them.

If you have a particularly small business which employs less than 10 people and is primarily based locally, then chances are that you know a lot about your business or if not, just enough to make sure that it doesn’t go under. However if you are running a larger show, you may never be able to understand what goes on in your company and surely that is a recipe for disaster.

It is surprising what can be discovered about your business when you explore the rich world of business process discovery. A tool of the business intelligence model, this process enables you to map the activities of your business and you may even be able to make some improvements. In this article we will highlight some of the basic processes and outcomes involved in the business discovery process (BPD). It is possible to automate the whole BPD process so that seasonal or process variations can quite easily be identified and responsive action implemented with the minimum of fuss.

BPD more often than not is primarily based on the examination of existing data/information gleaned through structured interviews with frontline staff followed by evidence-based verification via management information systems. The latter aspect can be automated depending on the resources available. At this point it is crucial to account for human subjectivity when responding to structured or even unstructured interviews as well as the frailties of memory and bias. Verification via an independent information system will provide an estimate of the reliability of the information that is being gathered.

One school of thought is that the ultimate aim of BPD is to standardize all processes, thereby eliminating the inconsistencies of human influence. Those that believe in this approach argue that computerized processed are less likely to be subject to inaccuracy and what some call noise. Whereas standardization is generally a peripatetic business objective not least because it enables proper performance management, it is also worth noting that without human influence in operations most businesses lose customer service.

The two business resources are complementary particularly when the ultimate goal is good business intelligence. It also adds to other information resources by providing data that is well sourced and subject to referrals as well as revisits of the original data sources.

What happens then when you effectively know about your company or organization? The logical step is to move on to embedding the reports from the BPD into the business intelligence model. A fringe benefit of this is that wastage and duplication is quite easily picked up and management action would presumably follow. It also facilitates the construction of business plans and bids for funding or contracts given the fact that it is actually a detailed description of what the organization actually does. So, challenge yourself and understand your business. You never know you might like it.

The first thing to recognize that process means that activities are interrelated. The negligence of one part will lead to the collapse of other parts. The need to keep a strategic perspective to any activities will become even more acute if there is a particular problem with a process that requires undue attention from the managers. If a consequence of this attention is that other parts of the project fail, then it will show a lack of attention to the idea of strategic oversight.

The manager cannot be expected to know every aspect of a business process but what they must know are the implications of that process on the business. You can get away with not knowing what something is as long as you understand the role it plays. Subordinates will be able to assist in getting over the detail. The responsibility for executive action over process links is a serious matter.

Structure also has a role to play here. The manager does not need to dictate every single convolution of a business process. However they could be well advised to create a template of minimum standards to which each team can work. The lack of structure has been known to work very well amongst creative people but given the importance of business performance management, this approach is less desirable. Therefore as a minimum the various aspects of the organization should be structured enough to at least be able to communicate and work with other departments.

Managers need to be aware of the evolutionary nature of business processes. This is a necessary progression for them to either cope with change or as a result of innovation by different members of the organization. The manager should not be in a mindset where they have a prepared negative answer to any form of request from the teams to change the processes. This sparks of traditionalism and failure to consider that innovation can be harnessed even during a performance management exercise.

On the other hand the manager also needs to be weary of those employees who change things just for the sake of changing things. They will suggest innovations that add little value to the business but create an awful lot of trouble and work for everyone else. Others might be on an ego trip and will be looking to impress managers with their endless proposals for improvement. The key is to strike a balance between allowing genuine innovation to flourish and preventing unnecessary shocks to the existing business systems in the name of giving overzealous employees an energy rush.