It’s somehow funny but for some reasons we (people) use to generate multiple systems from something that has just one objective by generating some fake objectives.
In this case it’s regarding the activities related with generating and providing information for decision making.
This kind of activities are provided today by different disciplines (that in some companies do share departments and in some others don’t) like Market Research, Web Analytics, Business Intelligence, CRM (part of it), Data Mining, and so on. So is getting harder to understand what’s the limit of each discipline.
So the people from those disciplines fight for hours arguing which information must be generated by the Market Research department, by the Web Analytics department, by the CRM department, by the BI department, and so forth.
So what came into my mind is why should I (as a CEO or business owner) have several departments that share the same damn objective? Nobody cares how big your ego is and/or how important you think your activity name (Web Analytics?) is, the only thing that matters is if you are generating value in the organization by providing people information for efficient decision making.
So what’s in the future? In my opinion in the future we will have just one discipline based on the different processed that has the same objective…”generating and providing Information“. What is gonna be its name? Call it as you want…just help people make decisions!