How E-Business is making the Middle East more profitable (page 1 of 4)

Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, USA, commented in a recent speech (The Bay Area Council Conference, San Franciso, California, January 11, 2002) on the difference in how companies are managing the current recession versus strategies and tactics in similar earlier periods of economic downturn. The conclusion was that this change in management is shortening the recovery rate of the overall economy to a notable degree. So what is the key difference?

"Thirty years ago, the timeliness of available information varied across companies and industries, often resulting in differences in the speed and magnitude of their responses to changing business conditions," Greenspan comments. "Our economic structure changed in the mid-1990s. The crucial agent of this remarkable change was the quantum leap in information availability." He continues, "Today, businesses have large quantities of data available virtually in real time. As a consequence, they address and resolve economic imbalances more rapidly than in the past."

Indeed, the ability to extract information across all business operations to obtain an instant view of what's happening across an entire organisation, whether it be sales, leads, liquidity, staff or inventory levels, can give a CEO a distinct advantage in making critical on-the-spot decisions to contain and manage the worst of any economic downturn.

So how prepared is corporate Middle East? How many CEOs would acknowledge that they are as informed as Greenspan indicates? The non stop flow of foreign competitors, the increasing number of cross-country trqansactions, the need to tap into different labour markets, are all factors requiring faster and more accurate access to consistent information across the corporation.

Many large Middle Eastern corporations are still operating as a number of independent business units and country units, and therefore have difficulties in getting real time information at the executive level to take quick decisions.
Although it is encouraging to see the benefits of information management being reflected at the macro economic level, there are considerable productivity improvements yet to come. As hardware and communications become increasingly commoditised, the better use of software is starting to dramatically reduce costs and increase productivity. The acceleration of information technology as a facilitator and enabler will increase many times over as we enter the ultimate model of computing, where software is delivered as an online service.

A single version of the truth
One of the reasons that executives were so slow to respond in the past was that they simply did not have a clear view of what was happening within their company. Maybe a large amount of data was available, but it was fragmented around the organisation in many different places, different isolated systems and incompatible formats. Additionally, the data was inconsistent due to different definitions, cut-off dates and measurement criteria.

The solution? A single central database that gives everybody in the organisations access to the same data. Many organisations are now bringing together all their separate systems to achieve this singular view. For example, one UAE local government is consolidating different systems into one data center for a 'single version of the truth.'

A single source of data gives the organisation the ability to combine information across all business operations.