| Doing business as usual is now a risky strategy. The
conventional wisdom about your company is no longer valid. The market in which you have
been successful disappeared last night. That is the bad news. The good news is that the
same has happened to your competitors. The objective of web farming is to enable your
company to adapt and even thrive within these massive changes. Amid the chaos of the Web
is a diversity of ever-changing information, some of which is critical to your business.
The challenge is to wade (with big boots) through the Web, discovering and acquiring those
information resources that have value to you. You must move from an information refining
process that is haphazard and wasteful to one that is systematic and productive
Data warehousing systems are widely used successfully for
systematic business intelligence. However, those systems only deal with data from internal
operational systems. In the  majority
of data warehousing efforts, enterprises focus inward. As markets become turbulent, data
from internal systems becomes less relevant to managing your business and planning for its
future.
This situation is like a person who is serenely contemplating
his navel, while a lion is about to be served lunch.
Instead, your business should be keenly alert to outside
information. As management guru Peter Drucker argues, the challenge is "to organize
outside data because change occurs from the outside." Drucker predicted that
the obsession with internal data leads organizations to be blindsided by external forces.
Does this depict the situation with your business? If so,
your business must become proficient with discovering and acquiring information from
sources external to your organization and utilizing this information to impact your key
business processes. |
