Information that cannot be ignored

It is evident from all the research available these days that Decision Support solutions have the power to make a vital contribution in firms of every type and size. Directors, executives and staff have been visually impaired, some even working “blind”, for far too long. Everyone needs a clear view of business data that is relevant to their job function. Management teams often need an assembly of summaries that have been collected from various parts of the enterprise.

Until now, delivering this information has been plagued with technical problems with the effect of sending IT investments wildly over budget. Company directors are on the rebound from over-specified projects for enterprise resource planning (ERP), having only just overcome the trauma, just a few years previously, of a management information system (MIS) that never quite lived up to expectations.

No surprise then that decision makers are totally disinterested in Decision Support systems that cost a small fortune to acquire or an eternity to deploy. Who can blame them? Nearly everyone is looking for simpler solutions these days.

What people are being offered

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions capable of extracting data from financial accounting packages or even certain ERP systems are, in one sense, nothing new. The big-name generalists have this down to a fine art. They appear omnipresent and supremely powerful yet, all that prestige comes at a price. Buyer beware, some depend on proprietary technology running “under the bonnet” and certain ones are remarkably inflexible when it comes to simple things like ad hoc reports.

There are of course the specialists. These solutions offer a best of breed approach quite often in specific vertical markets. There is nothing wrong with that. However, fewer specialist solutions than you would imagine really meet the mark when users want something that fetches data from one or many databases, formats it and delivers a report into software they already have some experience with. Arguably, the world’s most widely used spreadsheet application, Microsoft Excel, is that software.

Users at every corporate level feel at home with this “category killer” application. Whereas some companies have large pockets for training services, most do not. Large numbers of people arrive into companies already trained in Excel and many have become experienced users. More to the point, Excel already exists on their desktops so requires no supplementary investment by the company.

Some companies have taken it upon themselves to build their own Decision Support systems, and of those, certain ones have done a good job. Others, particularly in smaller companies, simply do not have the technical resource to develop so have relied on Microsoft Office, particularly on Excel, and have deployed add-ons to enhance the performance or to inject a degree of automation. This approach has been remarkably successful. Recently, it has been attracting huge interest from some of the larger dominant players looking to snatch a share of the small business market.

In other words, software applications that were previously regarded as technical tools in the IT department have been secretly maturing. After consistent refinement in an industry that takes no prisoners, these tools are arriving as robust integrated solutions in a world where computer platform or database type is almost irrelevant.

What people really want

User research[1] published this year evidences what we have known for a while: business decisions are taken in groups. Whether the nature of those decisions are strategic taken by a management team or operational taken by executive staff, the decisions are invariably taken in groups. This, therefore, places a different set of expectations on a Decision Support system. So why do so many vendors persist in offering software products that take little or no account of how users need to work.

Just imagine the advantages, if only in simple terms of efficiency in your organisation, of a Decision Support system that can fulfil all these headline requirements:

• Capable of extracting a wide range of data from enterprise databases
• Allows for sharing data summaries efficiently across users
• Positively encourages decisions being taken in groups
• Provides a deeper view of data immediately, whenever required
• Analysis of the data in a format everyone can understand
• Data presentation in a graphical context that people feel at home with
• Little or no supplementary investment required to get things up and running
• Sourced from an approachable supplier who knows what he’s doing
• Comes with reliable advice before, during and after the project
• Supported by a helpdesk that doesn’t “vanish” when things do go wrong

Extract from the white paper “Decision Support Systems: keys to a successful project”. Reproduced by kind permission. Copyright © Symtrax. All rights reserved.

CXO Europe readers can download a free copy of this whitepaper by clicking here.

Joseph Spear specialises in European business development planning and leads the markets and products strategy unit at Symtrax.

About Symtrax
Established in 1989, Symtrax is an international organisation best known for its multiplatform reporting solutions. The company focuses on five core business categories: Electronic Forms; Business Intelligence; Output Management; Archiving and Publishing; Consultancy Services. Putting reliability and ease of use first, Symtrax solutions help more than 3000 businesses everyday to operate more efficiently, to increase productivity, to save time, to cut waste and to be more competitive.