Wiley & sas business Series

      The Intelligent 
Enterprise 
                                    O
rganizations are, by and large, pretty dumb. Shows like  The Offi ce  
and comics like  Dilbert  are funny not because they ’re absurd but 
because at times they hit a little too close to home. Steering an 
organization can sometimes seem like a constant fi ght against chaos—
there ’s political intrigue, competing points of view, and sometimes 
even an active desire to subvert the system. One of the most stun-
ning cases I ’ve come across involved a business that actually ran an 
entire shadow IT department. They were eventually caught when 
they migrated their customer engagement system off their (already 
deployed) isolated network onto the cloud. 
 Culture is essential. So is capability. Culture might enable the 
vision, but without supporting skills, processes, technology, and data 
there ’s only good intentions. The goal in making it real is to try to tame 
the chaos inherent in managing highly complex systems and trans-
form into an intelligent enterprise. 
 Most organizations are united in a common objective. Despite 
this, people still act independently. Everyone knows their role but all 
too frequently people act in isolation. It works, but only to a degree; 
faced with instability or a changing market, the organization struggles. 
Quality suffers, cost increases, and ineffi ciencies abound. 
 A truly intelligent enterprise operates like our nervous system. It ’s 
adaptive, agile, and fl exible, able to respond quickly and appropriately 
Big Data, Big Innovation: Enabling Competitive Differentiation 
through Business Analytics by Evan Stubbs
Copyright © 2014 by SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

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B I G   D A T A ,   B I G   I N N O V A T I O N
to external stimuli. Faced with a threat, it mobilizes quickly and 
takes appropriate action. Interactions are sophisticated and tailored 
to opportunities and threats. On encountering either,  everything  that ’s 
needed is quickly deployed and engaged. Action and response is seam-
less, instantaneous, and automatic. 
 This chapter covers the  intelligent enterprise , as shown in Figure    4.1  . 
The fi ve levels it describes are progressive; they represent the path 
usually taken by organizations that focus on building capability. Real 
value starts at level three and continues from there.