CIO Research Library

Executives at small and midsize companies are making critical business decisions every day based on the information available to them. This information can come from a variety of sources: opinions from peers and colleagues; a personal sense of intuition or business judgment; or data derived internally or externally to the organization. This is particularly worrisome given the lack of confidence in data available to decision makers: a 2007 report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and commissioned by Business Objects found that nine out of ten corporate executives admit to making important decisions on the basis of inadequate information. This suggests that problems in decision-making are arising in the quality, amount, and timeliness of information. As a result, today’s small and midsize companies are destined to make a number of uninformed decisions on an alarmingly regular basis. Executives simply do not have the relevant information required to make the best decisions in a timely manner. They must thus find a way to create an accurate, actionable 360-degree view of their enterprise. Real-time visibility provides not only a means to verify and justify results, but also full confidence that small and midsize companies are leveraging consistency, accuracy, and timeliness via a single data source to make better, faster decisions.