Leveraging Information and Intelligence

When most consider business intelligence, they think of slicing and dicing their own enterprise data so there is better visibility into the state of the business. However, with the availability of valuable external data sets that can be "mashed up" with your enterprise data, the trend is to look outside of the firewall for the data that tells the real story around your business.

Case in point, while your sales data may tell the story about your trend in sales, up or down, around a specific product, it can't tell you how that trend is related to key economic indicators over the same period of time, or better yet, industry sales trends on the same line of products. That information is available, as-a-service, over the Internet. You just need to know where to find it, and how to leverage it.

This is nothing new, of course, we've been culling information from the Internet for some time now. What's changed in the number of data sets that are now available, and our ability to access that data, placing it along side of our own. Moreover, the creative approaches to what can be done with that data in the context of modern business intelligence approaches and technologies.

As time goes on, the data outside of the organization will become more important to business intelligence than the data you own. The number of data points will increase, and there will be data specific around verticals, communities, and even products or services, all available to determine the health of your business in comparison.
The issue here is that many doing business intelligence do not see this coming, and have been pushing back on any attempt to use data they don't happen to create or own. Those guys will be overtaken shortly by the clear opportunity here. Don't be that guy.