Why Business Intelligence Is the New Oil for the Upcoming Enterprise

Much has been said about data being the new oil that will fuel businesses in the future. But the reality is that it’s not about the amount of data that organizations have access to, but how effective their decisions are based on that data. Therefore, data alone will not be the new oil, rather intelligence will fuel the digital economy, and organizations that can create intelligent business processes to deliver contextualized and consent-based experiences will win in this new data-driven world. As intelligence (and technology in general) increasingly underpins future business models, there is a big question around the role of IT moving forward. The CIO needs to be part of boardroom discussions driving decision-making around the broader business (and digital) strategy. This raises yet another debate about the role of the CIO in this context. In parallel, there is clearly an emerging role in a digital platform architecture to drive “moments of truth” into these intelligent business processes. The next phase of the application landscape evolution is going to all be about integration, and IDC believes that integration and extension capabilities are critical to drive the business-process orchestration strategy enabling future business processes. This platform will provide a unified set of connection points across multiple systems’ applications and digital apps that might be distributed across on-premises, hosted, or public clouds. Based on these capabilities, the digital platform can be used to fast-track integration and trigger new workflows/business processes, leveraging applications that could be a mix of legacy on-premises and SaaS applications. The proposed research focusses on how Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence could potentially play out in many futuristic organizations.