The recent slide on the Dow Jones that has taken the index below 10,000 for the first time in 3 months is the surest indicator yet that the recession hangover has not fully left us. No doubt the Eurozone troubles have a large part to play in this, but the larger picture is that although recovering, the world economy is still in such a fragile state that any problem anywhere can stop the recovery everywhere.

As business leaders, this puts additional pressure on us. Should I now plan and invest now to take advantage of the growth that I hope to see over the next 12 months, or should I wait just in case the whole recovery stalls and/or slows down? One thing I have found out over the last year is that while IT investment cannot be kept on hold any longer without degrading business capability, it is possible, even in this environment to look at IT as more than just maintenance, as an investment that can improve the business decision making capability.

The development of new platforms and tools in the Business intelligence space ( cloud, mobile and on premise) means that now, more than any other time in the past, it is possible to analyze and make sense of data more quickly and relatively inexpensively. This means that rather than spend on new software that will collect even more data, now may be a good time to build/buy robust analytics software that can better use the existing data locked away in your existing systems, in order to make better decisions. And it needs to do so in an easy to use manner, so that business leaders can do the job themselves and not have to rely on expensive human analysts to download data and slice and dice them on ubiquitious spreadsheets.  

Businesses today can neither afford the time not the cost for this spreadsheet mania. Our own research has discovered amazing ways by which companies today can leverage low cost BI solutions to ensure that their software doesn’t just provide data, but track KPIs that are closely linked to the business health of the firm. After all, if the recession has forced our people to rise to the challenge, shouldn’t we expect the same from our existing business software applications as well?