Too Much Data or the Wrong Type of Data?

Last November I wrote a post to my blog about a new perspective on IT. In this post I discussed my reaction to an article explaining that IT needs to pay more attention to the value of the data rather than only delivering the information system. Today, I came across an article that embodies this problem.

The article discussed the issue of data overload at a call center. Apparently, this call center collected a large amount of historical data and provided a complete portfolio of reports to their staff and the staff was overwhelmed by the volume of data available. The data and reports primary supported analysis of call center efficiency and did not provide information about customer interactions. The call center collects a large amount of data but is not using a majority of this data and does not collect data on the type of information that is currently needed to make decisions.

Now, back to my point about the need to focus on data. In this call center case, the call center data, applications, and reports provided a robust amount of information for the staff but these reports did not support the current need of understanding customer interactions. Rather than building systems and reports based on a large bucket of easily collected data, organizations need to determine where decisions are made and the type of information needed for these decisions. This will help the organizations identify the data needed to support decisions and allow them to build or purchase information systems to deliver this valued information.

By focusing on the end needs of business intelligence applications, these systems can be constructed so that the correct information is available for timely decisions. This is the value the end users and knowledge workers are looking for from the business intelligence applications.