What, you may ask, do Ostriches have to do with Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) or, indeed, with SAS? Well I saw an ad for SAS on the back of DM Review this month with an Ostrich. I forget the punch line but the reason for the Ostrich was that its eyes are bigger than its brain. This struck me as an interesting analogy for many companies’ approach to using their data - their eyes (reports, dashboards) are much bigger than their brains (analytics).

Is this harsh - after all no-one likes being compared to an Ostrich really - well perhaps. But far too many organizations are obsessed with what they can see in their data and spend far too little time thinking about what to do based on their data. In many ways this is the difference between a BI attitude, focused on reporting and visibility, and an EDM attitude focused on data-driven action.

So, don’t be an Ostrich, adopt EDM today…