Lack of data clarity possibly spurred GFC

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 17 March 2010 16:37

Business IT - Technology

If business intelligence failed the world’s financial institutions, spurring the global financial crisis, it was probably because the organisations were “almost using the data to tell the story they wanted.”

Margy Ross, president of business intelligence and data warehousing consulting firm the Kimball Group, is in Australia this week presenting a four day workshop in conjunction with Sydney based Altis Consulting. She said that it seemed as though financial institutions had in the past been “serving up pockets of data – but not seeing it in context.”

Ross argues that the only way to make data warehousing and business intelligence valuable and meaningful is to really understand how a business operates and what it needs to improve. (In light of the GFC the answers to these two questions for the financial sector at least seem to have been: opaquely and just about everything.)

Delivering real business intelligence could not be achieved by simply throwing technology at a problem Ross warned.

She said that people needed to be “half DBA (database analyst) and half MBA (Masters of business Administration)” to wring real value out of data warehousing and analysis.

This was even more important as the volumes of information available to organisations increased exponentially thanks to internet and sensor feeds. “I have just been working with an organisation. They capture 68 billion events a day.”

She said that the internet service provider had to make sense of the 68 billion events; to sample it, synthesis it and do some research. “Lots of folks don’t need to look at 68 billion pieces of information,” she said.