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For almost a decade, companies have been investing in IT systems to support business process automation and to enable data-driven decision making. The good news is that those investments have generated acceptable ROIs, most core functions have IT systems to support them, and the leaders of those functions use the generated data to make decisions every day. What happens now?

 

Most companies have refreshed their IT systems two or three times, replacing aging infrastructure and applications with newer technology. Unfortunately, the harvested benefits of incremental improvement do not match the incurred costs or deliver the expectations that were set with the initial system implementations or continuous environmental drivers. The low-hanging fruit from functional IT systems has been harvested, and companies must look for new ways to increase the crop yields of their IT systems. The next decade of value for most companies will not come from the IT systems of individual functions, but from the integrated insights that are the results of looking at the processes and systems across the enterprise.

 

IT staff members have learned to include reporting capabilities as part of the core requirements for new software, and vendors have been eager to provide them as a part of their offerings. Almost all IT software is purchased off-the-shelf and managed internally by the IT department, or consumed as cloud services, and now include fairly sophisticated reporting capabilities. These are aligned to the business functions the software is designed to support – providing improvedfunctional insights to end-users and decision makers. This reporting is sufficient (and in some cases ideal) to support the discrete needs of the individual business function or process and, during time, has enabled companies to independently optimize  sales, manufacturing, finance, customer support, IT and other functions. The downside has been a tendency to create siloed business behavior and blind spots to data in other parts of the organization.

 

Modern businesses are becoming more aware of the blurred dividing lines across organizations, as business leaders work together to address mounting cost pressures to retain their competitive advantage. Not only has the low-hanging fruit of functional optimization already been harvested, but it is also becoming clear to many leaders that optimizing cross-functionally across the company not only leads to greater efficiency and reduced duplication, but impacts opportunities and the potential for value on a much larger scale.

 

To enable cross-functional optimization, IT organizations must deliver capabilities to business decision makers to look at data across the organization, allowing them to gain the integrated insights they need. With a sizable installed base of IT systems already in use, there is often little management appetite to invest in wholesale replacements of existing systems (that may only be a few years old) with something new and integrated. There is also a fear of losing the functional benefits already gained from the existing IT systems.

 

For IT departments to provide integrated insights while retaining the value of existing systems, many IT leaders are looking to IT Data Management and data-validation technology as part of their solution. Gathering disparate data sources requires a number of steps, including integration, validation and reconciliation, which all must be performed in a structured and logical way to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of the integrated data set. Blazent intelligently reconciles disparate data sources throughout an organization to provide a unified data set that is thoroughly validated, and upon which confident decision makers can rely. You can learn more in the Data Powered IT white paper here.

 

The low-hanging fruit of functional insights may have already been harvested in your organization, but don’t be alarmed. There is a much bigger crop still on the tree in the form of integrated insights that can feed the decision-making hunger of your company well into the future. With the right tools, your IT department can help you harvest these insights and provide you the trusted and high-quality data your company needs. For further  information, please contact us at sales@blazent.com