Regardless of the economic climate, midsize companies have an inherent advantage in out-performing their larger competitors based on the ability to adapt faster to changing market conditions.

To realize this advantage, they must make smarter decisions and quickly take action.  But many lack the insight they need to make key decisions and can only hope that they have made the right ones.

Managers Missing Out
Hope is not a strategy; it’s a roll of the dice. Consider the following startling results from a recent survey conducted by Accenture:

• 42% of managers use wrong information at least once a week
• 59% of managers miss information they should have used
• 47% of users don’t have confidence in their information

It’s not that they lack the data, but rather lack the organization and presentation to derive meaningful information.  And to further analyze this information to uncover new opportunities to grow revenue and reduce costs.   This is the role of business intelligence (BI) solutions, but BI alone is only part of the answer.  To quickly take action on those opportunities, businesses need to align the right resources and manage performance against their new initiatives.  This is the role of planning, budgeting and forecasting solutions.

Many midsize companies see spreadsheets as the panacea, but its part of the problem.  Spreadsheets cause silos of inconsistent data, inconsistent calculations, and time consuming and error-prone aggregations. 

Connect Insight with Action
Now more than ever, it is imperative to have an interconnected system to connect BI with planning -- to connect insight with action. But existing enterprise class solutions have been beyond the reach for most of the midmarket, until recently. 

A new breed of integrated BI and planning solutions is now hitting the market to enable midsize companies to fully exploit their competitive advantage and outflank competitors of any size. 

Plug In Self-Service Capabilities
With the ability to plug into existing infrastructure and provide users with self-service capabilities to build reports and dashboards to monitor and analyze results, these solutions will go a long way toward putting that actionable information into the hands of the people who can put it to work for the business.

I’m happy to answer any questions or concerns you have about this new generation of BI and I’d like to invite CIOs at midsize organizations to reach out and share your experiences—and what‘s keeping you up at night.