Effectively managing your company’s business performance
hinges on getting the straight and accurate story behind the
numbers that represent past results, current plans, and future
forecasts.
Historically, corporations have relied primarily on data
captured in Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets or in a similar
database-driven, structured format as the source of corporate
intelligence. Yet recent analyst reports have shed new light
on the importance of unstructured data, originating externally
or from employee desktops, claiming that an astounding 85
percent of corporate knowledge is buried in unstructured documents.
This new revelation unveils the missing, critical element
to gaining a complete understanding of organizational performance.
For most organizations, unstructured operational information
is scattered across multiple technology systems or trapped
on employee desktops in PowerPoint® or Microsoft®
Word documents, email attachments, or even Web site links.
Without strategic, real-time access to a unified, single version
of the facts, gaining a true picture of your organization’s
health and overall performance can prove disturbingly elusive,
if not impossible.
The Imperative of Change
Today’s corporate decision-makers are feeling tremendous
pressure to move swiftly in a fast-changing market while maintaining
high standards of accuracy, transparency, and accountability
to their employees, stakeholders, and the SEC. The recent
rash of accounting and corporate misappropriation scandals,
coupled with the dot.com collapse, has led to a growing skepticism
of the validity of corporate performance reports and a demand
for the story behind the summary-level numbers. The advent
of stricter rules making corporate decision-makers personally
accountable for the legitimacy of their performance results
has public companies braced for even greater scrutiny from
federal regulators.
Simultaneously, as companies expand their operations through
mergers, acquisitions, and multi-national initiatives, the
ability to communicate globally without delay has become an
increasingly significant competitive advantage. Managers in
different parts of the world must be able to base their decisions
upon a single, real-time set of corporate performance indicators.
For instance, SPL Worldgroup, a leading provider of best-of-breed
customer management solutions, faced the challenge of compiling
and disseminating financial information across 175 budget
units transacting in seven different currencies and 14 worldwide
offices. While transactional business intelligence (BI) software
like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems are beneficial for capturing
and assessing a broad array of corporate intelligence, they
could not give SPL a unified solution to link structured data
with unstructured intelligence in order to make decisions
globally in real-time.
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