South African businesses that have implemented business intelligence (BI) initiatives say they are deriving excellent results from their solutions at enterprise level, despite the fact that real-time, actionable BI for most is still a work in progress.
This was the overall key message at last week's ITWeb BI conference, which brought together a cross-mix of IT executives from various industries, who are working towards deriving added value from BI in their respective enterprises.
SAS Institute was once again a Silver Sponsor at the annual conference, an event that was created with the end-users' perspective in mind, and content was focused on working solutions and the practical examples of BI in action.
"This year saw more than 180 delegates from all over southern Africa attending the two-day event. Each individual gained insight into the many aspects of BI from the unique mix of speakers, all of whom are thought leaders and innovators in their respected fields," says Carel Badenhorst, Product Manager Business Intelligence at SAS South Africa.
SAS had several customers speaking at the event as industry experts on the implementation of BI, including Ronelle Brandt from Stats SA, Judy Goodall from Momentum and Gustav Heymann from Fifth Discipline.
Brandt, who is the Quality and Methodology Manager at Stats SA, gave a demonstration on the BI tools recently introduced to improve the quality of statistics at Statistics South Africa; Goodall, a Business Analyst from Momentum, shared insight into the organisation's deployment of best-of-breed technologies to support business decision-making, such as data warehousing, data analysis and predictive modelling; and Heymann, BI Consultant at Fifth Discipline Group, shared Eskom Distribution's strategy of utilising SAS BI technologies for better operational performance management by measuring business processes to enhance its performance using an end-to-end SAS architecture.
"This event was an excellent occasion for end-users to hear real world examples of BI implementations from industry experts and thought leaders in various fields. It was also a great opportunity for some of our customers to present SAS case studies of real working solutions of BI in action, and to share the experience and lessons learnt through their delivery and implementation journey using our vast knowledge of BI," Badenhorst concludes.
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