Q: For which of these purposes do you use business intelligence/data analysis software?
According to Dennis Adams, "As companies begin looking at the piles of data being collected by systems such as those for ERP, SCM, CRM, and social networks, it is little wonder that companies are paying more and more attention to the issue of Big Data, which can be defined as today's rapidly collected large amount of data volume in various formats. To make use of this valuable resource -- and, in particular, to not be buried underneath it -- companies from this year's IT trends survey appear to be looking toward business analytics systems. Keeping in mind that most companies are in the business of making things and selling them or delivering services, it should come as no surprise that the most commonly used tools by this year's survey respondents focus on the supply chain or marketing/sales part of the value chain."
* Excerpted from "Managing IT in the Enterprise: Full Steam Ahead" (
), Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 12, No. 1.