MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

 

Evolving From Information to Insight

By Glover Ferguson, Sanjay Mathur and Baiju Shah

January 15, 2005

Organizations are increasingly able to gather and process information from a variety of new sources. But competitive advantage will still belong to those who know how to use it.

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Business leaders often believe their organizations are swamped with business process information collected through their own enterprise systems or those of their business partners, most of which is trapped in data warehouses. They seek to harness it and use it to inform better decision making, financial management and customer service.1 What they do not realize is that, even if they were able to meet this goal, they would merely have caught up with yesterday. The information frontier is moving forward quickly, opening up incredibly rich streams of new information sources and formats and dramatically increasing the technical ability to manage them. Forward-looking companies must stay ahead of that curve.

Consider an everyday example. More than 30 million packages are delivered globally by courier services every business day. All too often, the recipient isn’t there to receive the package when it arrives, which is frustrating for him, the sender and the courier. The problem is that packages are directed to a physical location, which is static, but the intended recipient is mobile. Yet with information and technology available today, the delivery “address” could be a person who could be found in real time, anywhere.

How would that work? Imagine that a delivery company had access to your electronic appointments calendar and could locate you using the Global Positioning System via your vehicle or cell... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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