Data Sharing Continues to Grow

Executives are making more decisions based on enterprise intelligence, helping to drive the need for more information and making it available across the intelligent enterprise, according Bob Fair, CMO for Teradata. Teradata's fifth annual survey on enterprise decision-making, which was released at the 2006 annual Teradata users-group conference, states that 68 percent of corporate level executives say that their number of daily decisions have increased over the last year, while 96 percent say that the volume of data is increasing. More than half (52 percent) says that data is doubling or tripling every year.

It's not just the corporate level executives who are attempting to examine more data to make more decisions, according to the survey. Companies are also relying on more distributed data to enable more junior level executives to make decisions.

The increase in business decisions is expanding even faster in the Asia Pacific region, reflecting the area's growth, than it is in the U.S., according to Fair. A major change from the first year of the survey is that executives now see customer loyalty as the top risk of poor decision-making, rather than profits, as in the 2002 survey. Profits were the third most cited risk of poor decision-making in the 2006 survey, behind customer loyalty and company reputation among customers. In the current survey, company productivity was the fourth most cited risk and customer service was fifth.

"Companies are doing a better job of servicing their customers," Fair says, citing better access to real time or near real time information than they had in previous years, so that this is now becoming a business necessity. Fair cites one of the comments of a survey respondent: "As business becomes increasingly reliant on information streams in real time usage and applications, your company needs to adapt of the fly, or become buried."

Part of adapting on the fly is adopting an enterprisewide data warehouse that enables lower level executives (i.e., store or branch managers) to make decisions (i.e., accept a return that is past return date from a profitable customer while rejecting one from a less profitable customer), according to Fair. Thirty-seven percent of survey respondents say they are enabling front line staff to make an increasing amount of critical business decisions. Forty-one percent of respondents say they are using business intelligence to make over half of the decisions in the company.

Fair says enterprisewide data is no exaggeration; businesses are integrating information at all levels, giving perspective and power to all workers. "Critical business decision making is being extended up, down and across organizations."

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