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SMBs looking to imporve the insight of their employees need to decide how to allocate their scarce human, capital, and IT resources to tasks and projects that have the biggest posibitve impact on improving insight. They need to focuon on technology as well as on business process and organizational behavior capabilities.

One of the keys to achieving greater insight is to encourage and then enable open communication among different business groups and between business groups and IT. Today on 14% of organizations indicate that individuals from one group completely understand data metrics, and performance indicators produced by other groups' business processes and systems.

Improved communication can be achieved by establishing a BI compentency cneter and data governance body. These teams can be formal or informal, but they should be composed of representatives from both busines and IT groups. Managers should encourage ongoing interaction between these two constituencies.

Another tool for improving insight is training, which is often overlooked. Only 17% of organizations are very satisfied with training on the meaning of performance indicatiors, B1 tools, and analytics - all key enablers of insight. It is important to focus training on learning a specific software tools as well as the meaning of data. Employees should also receive training on the use of analytics.

IDC reserach indicates that training on the use of data and training on the use of BI tools are important in and of themselves, but SMBs can realize greater benefits if they train their employees on both the use of data and the use of tools.

And the design of these tools and systems to support your employees individual tasks should be a key focus area for SMBs. When a BI solution is well design, it is easier to add to it new data sources, new domains, new reports, new metrics, and new data hierarchies. They quality of the design can inform system flexibility and organizational agility in response to ongoing decision support demands. Dissatisfaction with an IT group's ability to rapidly respond to new requests in the primary cause for end users to seek alternative BI solutions to those provided by central IT resources. Thus, scant attention is paid to the quality of a system's design often leads to silors of information that don't follow data governance policies. As a result, some business groups may go off and buy their own software without regards to centralized purchasing practices; "shadow" IT groups within business groups may even crop up.

With the above statements in mind, SAP offers solutions that are ideal for your business, no matter how big or small your company may be. With multiple leasing and cloud-based options, your SAP software solution is closer than ever before, giving you the flexibility to run your business in real-time, getting access to the right information at the right time.

SAP solutions are flexible - than can be easily tailored or extended to meet your unique needs as your business grows. With its flexible architecture and hundreds of industry-specific solutions provided by experienced SAP partners, it offers both immediate and long term benefits for growing companies like yours.

If agility is important to your business, contact us to learn more about SAP today. You'll be surprised how quickly you can accelerate business growth - and make the most of each opportunity.

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