Information Management and Analytics

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, President & CEO

Marcia Kaufman, Partner

Sponsored by IBM

The Challenges of Leveraging Information
Organizations will be increasingly driven to take a holistic approach to leveraging all their relevant information – structured and unstructured – to face their information challenges. Just assembling, managing, processing and securing large volumes of data is very challenging. The task is made more difficult when there is a need to access and integrate information, often replicated with different degrees of accuracy, from different domains to support improved decision making. Among the challenges that organizations face when they set out to leverage their information, the following are particularly important to overcome:

Author
Fern Halper

As information flows from the 20,000 sources, it is structured, cross-referenced, stored, and then matched against a user’s specific True Lead profile.

The name of the game in sales is obtaining high quality leads in order to improve the number of sales closed. This can be a time-consuming process that involves research, buying lists of potential prospects, cold calling, and a number of other activities. The ultimate goal is to identify information that is a precursor for a high propensity to buy. This information is referred to as a trigger. For example, a trigger for an office supply company might be new businesses moving into the area that will need office supplies. Sales people are beginning to utilize Internet search engines to gather information about potential leads.

Author
Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

Exeros helps companies discover the relationship between data in different databases
A typical large company may have hundreds of databases that were built for various purposes such as to support ERP, CRM, or e-commerce initiatives - but does the company understand the relationship of the data in one database to another database? The answer is, not likely. There are a number of reasons why this understanding is critical including speeding up data integration initiatives, deploying new applications, or building master data. And, if a company doesn’t know what data it has and how it relates, how can it build an enterprise-wide metadata repository?

Author
Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

Infogix Enables IT to Control their Enterprise Information
Controlling the information flowing through an enterprise is critical. Hurwitz & Associates believes that there is a disconnect between how companies implement business rules and ensuring that these rules propagate through their business processes. This can have a direct impact on how trustworthy the information flowing through an enterprise really is. While many companies are implementing data quality initiatives to ensure that their static data resources are trustworthy, they may be missing the mark when it comes to dealing with dynamic data that flows through their business processes. I was recently reminded of this fact when I met with Infogix (formerly Unitech Systems), which provides IT with automated internal information controls.

Author
Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

MarketSight provides an intuitive interface that enables users to run cross-tabulations (cross tabs) to summarize data.

Consider the following scenario: A company is looking to enhance their product. They deploy an online survey to hundreds of their existing customers as well as prospects to determine new product features. The results are in, waiting to be analyzed by a vendor or internal market research team. Product management is anxiously awaiting the analysis… and waiting. Why does product management need to wait for someone else to analyze these survey results? The answer is that, until recently, they simply didn’t have the right tools to do it themselves.