InformationWeek just published their 2008 InformationWeek 500 report, revealing IT strategies from the 500 best and brightest companies in North America. There are some interesting findings in this report, including an analysis of how the "Top 100" compare the rest of the companies in the study.
One of the most interesting is that the Top 100 are less focused on lowering costs and increasing efficiency than the rest, but are instead investing more in initiatives that have the potential to increase revenue and build business by finding new ways to engage their customers through technology and delivering more timely business intelligence to employees. This is pretty much in line with my comments about the importance of leveraging information in today's unique economic environment. Another interesting tidbit is that when asked what steps these organizations are taking to optimize the efficiency of their business processes, 89% said they are improving data integration between systems or departments (80% of the rest of the companies were doing the same).
It seems like these investments are driving productivity gains too. Deploying business intelligence tools and new types of collaboration software were identified as the two most effective steps managers have made in the past 12 months to raise company productivity. In fact, 34% of the 500 companies surveyed said that they are disseminating better business intelligence to more employees faster - a significant jump up from 18% last year.
There is also an intriguing view into the disparity of BI usage across different industries. 90% of retail companies claim wide deployment of BI tools...100% of general merchandising retailers! Other high users of BI tools were companies in hospitality/travel, logistics/transportation, distribution and consumer goods. What surprised me was that banking/financial services organizations were towards the bottom of the list! Could this be a reason for the financial crisis we're facing now?
Overall, it seems that the leading organizations have realized that the key to competing in today's market is to make your employees smarter by giving them more intelligence.
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