7 September 2009 | A comment by Karsten Fogh Ho-Lanng

As long as new technology only adds to a process without adding anything new – it remains the same technology. If an intranet is just another way to find Word files; if a portal is really just a collection of links to other sites with information organised in the usual way, there is no real added value – just facelift. Or take IP telephony, which basically is still just a dial tone with a reputation for being a little more unstable than its predecessor. Possibly the greatest benefit of IP telephony is that the cost of making a call has been reduced.  

So what does it take for technology to add real value? Which business pains should we focus on? An obvious place to start is in information seeking and business intelligence (BI). The amount of data we have to navigate to find the answers to our questions is increasing at an explosive rate, but we still expect instant and absolute answers. It’s not enough that the answer is based on internal, well-structured data such as what we get from financial system cubes. BI is all about good decisions – but good decisions  aren’t solely based on information from financial systems, production systems and CRM systems. They’re also based on competitor behaviour, new technological developments, macro economic factors, and political decisions, not to mention our individual knowledge.

In other words, decisions are made based on internal and external factors, as well as structured and unstructured data sources.

The intelligent portal helps information seekers compare the right sources, so we have the best foundation for decision making. But where is the ‘intelligence’ in this? An IT-based solution, which analyses complex links based on both qualitative and quantitative information and makes sound decisions based on analysis, is realistically (and luckily) beyond our reach at present. The ‘intelligence’ must use what we’ve already registered – the user’s context.

The information seeker must be made context-independent. Financial analyses or documents, for instance, should be filed based on the context in which they’re created: If I’m at assembly line A when I ask for an analysis, the context-based BI solution automatically assumes that I want assembly line A analysed. If the only project I can register time for at the moment is project B, document control will automatically assume that my time should be allocated to that project.  

And that’s what we mean when we say: technology becomes valuable when it adds value.