When it comes to politics some have said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s pretty much the same when it comes to business. Routing out poor performing products, services, or business lines takes the ability to shine a light on them. That’s where business intelligence (BI) is increasingly coming in.
Business intelligence has performed well as a corporate housecleaning agent – reducing the inefficiencies related to manual data entry for report creation and corporate ‘Excel farms’ creating one-off reports to satisfy individual stakeholders. Now it’s time for business intelligence to move closer to its ultimate goal of shedding light on all the dark corners of an enterprise’s data stores. New technologies, such as mobile accessibility, and better integration capabilities that can extract and normalize data from multiple, disparate legacy systems are features of the latest crop of business intelligence tools that reveal the promise for companies to seek a previously unavailable level of insight into their businesses, and drive top-line growth along with the standard cost-savings associated with BI and analytic tools.
Read our full IT Briefcase column on the value that business intelligence can deliver to corporations.
We’ve written a lot about both enterprise social networking and sustainability. But now we’re seeing the emergence of enterprise social networking tools for furthering sustainability initiatives.
For example, Enablon, a leader and ten-year veteran in corporate sustainability solutions, recently launched Wizness (wise business). Wizness is a social networking platform that seeks to help companies promulgate and share information on sustainability issues throughout their supply chains. It includes company-specific profiles that can be created and managed to filter news-based content around sustainability. It also includes expert communities on a variety of sustainability topics, forums for sharing best practices, and the ability to track metrics on a company’s sustainability performance.
Read our recent IT Briefcase article for more information on Enablon, Wizness, and social networks for sustainability.
Upside Research believes that Wizness is a brilliant idea for furthering sustainability efforts within a specific industry. The key challenge to its success will be for Enablon to attract the key thought leaders in the various topic areas of sustainability to participate in the Wizness communities, and share best practices and information about industry-specific