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Articles: business intelligence

Using business intelligence for competitive advantage
Author:Mark Davis

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Set Objectives

 Fundamentally, it is important to focus attention on the activities to be undertaken, to establish guidelines for the way ahead, and to ensure that everyone concerned knows clearly what is going on within the process. Coventry (1984) states that objectives impart direction, purpose and meaning to the operation. It is necessary to ensure that people know exactly what needs to be done and how to go about it.

The setting of objectives supports the BIP with a number of important functions, guidance for a coordinated effort of individuals, establishes expected performance standards, and provides the means for evaluation and control of the process. Mukhi and Potts (1984) believe that objectives are the first link in any control sequence. These objectives are a major force affecting the primary components of the system, and need to be expressed properly to achieve regulated and controlled relationships between the workers and the functions.

Define Functions

Activities, such as information management, must be broken down into functions. One of the most durable contributions of administrative theorists is the study of management as a set of functions. Fayol was an early advocate of this approach and believes that the best way to understand an organisation is to study its administrative apparatus - management.

The following points indicate the essential elements required to define resources to benefit functions and activities:

  • understand the objectives of the paradigm;
  • plan the resource needs to carry out the process;
  • staffing needs; and
  • establish effective relationships.

Define Resources

As a data control process, the BIP obligates collective association of all the components in the paradigm. Definitive resource acquisition and application will maintain focus and yield a successful entry to the first of the cyclical components - direction. Cooperation and teamwork linking functions and resources are an integral part of the control mechanisms for the BIP. This control requires a number of variables and has both analytical and human behavioural dimensions, of which the behavioural usually causes the most problems. Schuler et al (1992) state that without effective planning, an organisation may find itself without the people to run it.

Organisations can no longer assume that the right number of appropriately qualified people will be available. Schuler et al (1992) also declared that companies are increasingly forced to think about using human resource planning to gain a competitive advantage

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