Today’s business environment is reactive by its very nature. While some enterprises will try and second guess their respective markets, doing so without a solid foundation of information is not only near impossible, but also leads to any decisions being half-hearted at best.

Consequently, making the right strategic choices, and doing so quickly, is a critical component of organisational agility. The question is, how do businesses go about actually achieving a level of flexibility and insight which ultimately equates to rapid decision making?

Business intelligence and agility

The answer is simple, via thorough and effective business intelligence (BI) and data analytics.

However, finding a tangible, viable solution is easier said than done. A report from TDWI Research surmised that even as a huge swathe of organisations look to shift their practices to support more fluid decision making, the applicable BI solutions that provide the raw data to be analysed are not keeping up.

This issue has to be addressed in the here and now, especially as the reliance on more thorough insights will be a key component of making rapid enterprise decisions in the future.

As noted by ComputerWeekly, Forrester’s BI maturity survey indicates that, in general, the level of the data practices carried out by today’s companies will not be able to deal with future change.

The future of BI

While there’s no definitive solution that will become the norm, there will be a few accepted standards of BI that will come to prominence. For example, as a core principle, companies will need to bridge the gap between information silos and BI.

Currently, this simply isn’t the case.

To reiterate, the future of BI will be centred on the four pillars of automation, pervasiveness, unity and limitlessness.

Why bother?

Organisations may hear buzzwords such as agility and be worried that putting together a system that is more effective in the future will cost a potent mixture of time and money. Consequently, the question will likely be whether the end result of more fluid decisions is really worth the outlay?

Innovation propels itself in the business world at an exponential rate. Those that don’t plan to be agile in the future competitive enterprise environment and focus on the here and now, will be unable to deal with the inevitable changes. More on what the McKinsey & Company Director Marc Singer calls the metabolic rate of innovation can be seen in this video:

Ultimately, BI and enterprise agility are inextricably linked, and the reliance on the former to better stimulate the latter will only be further accentuated in the future. Companies that think progressively, and respect both BI and analytics together as one will be the organisations likely to find success.