The science of Business Intelligence

As Syria progressively moves towards a liberalized economy, necessity, nature, and promise of Business Intelligence, especially as applied to the Syrian economic and geostrategic context become apparent.

With Syria’s new environment empowering new players, innovative business concepts are beginning to emerge as possible responses to existing challenges that face all businesses entering this new market.
One prime example of such a challenge is a lack of the sort of comprehensive and reliable data investors need to clearly understand and enter the Syrian market. The unavailability
of such data hinders investors from pinpointing economic opportunities, and from developing business strategies that are both profitable to them and also contribute to the
economic development of Syria. The absence or poor quality of economic data is a major impediment to Syrian economic progress. Today as perhaps never before, all the assorted players should understand one fundamental truth: “accurate information is power!”
To these challenges, one particularly effective response does exist: Business Intelligence (BI). Today, BI offers a cutting-edge service that has proven useful to investors around the world.
The new industry of BI provides the following products: monitoring specific markets; collecting and standardizing business data; analyzing the data; and producing reliable reports that educate company executives about what they need to know in relation to a specific market or opportunity of interest.
The beauty of BI does not lie only in the elements specified above. There is a fifth and all-important factor:
forecasting. Forecasting empowers investors to predict future economic, political, and geostrategic conditions of the countries and industries that they propose to enter. Forecasting complements all the financial reports that investors need to decide whether
to embrace or drop an investment opportunity.
Forecasting, perhaps the most vital of all of the services that BI offers, cannot be restricted to the economic domain only. Rather, BI must include geopolitics, domestic and
international, otherwise probably best summarized under the rubric of geostrategy. Only objective, analytical geostrategic analyses, incorporating a variety of economic data but going well beyond the economic realm, can provide potential investors with the facts and probabilities that are critical to making responsible business decisions.
Some may argue that there have been success stories in the past for corporations that did not use BI. Others may claim that the Syrian market is not mature enough for such a
sophisticated service. The short answer to both arguments is that any past or present success story in business and investment surely did utilize the BI concept in one fashion or another.
Indeed, successful entrepreneurs may not have called it BI, or even realized that what they were doing was in fact BI. The point is that most prior successful ventures have not relied on high-quality, professional sources to collect and assess the information that they have required. Today, BI firms tune the services they provide to the specific needs of the corporations with which they contract, and offer them continuous, on-call market
monitoring services.
Few investors, especially foreign businessmen, will place significant funds in “problematic” regions threatened by political instability, war, or “terrorism.”
Today, Syria, as well as corporate and individual investors, is in need of BI more than ever. The emergence of BI comes as a natural response to the new era that Syria is
entering and will potentially provide an enormous stimulus to rational economic development.
One final point is relevant here. Since politics is inextricable from economics, BI, economic development, and international geostrategic influence should all be understood to constitute part of a single package. Without free trade, an increasingly open society,
and a rule of law, Syria will neither be able to compete effectively on the world stage nor will it be able to develop rapidly at home.
BI, permitted to operate in an untrammeled environment without fear or favor, will provide the hard and predictive data that all entrepreneurs require before making critical investment decisions. BI forecasting is perhaps one of the most important new industries of our time. Doing business in Syria is not an easy task, but it is a predictable one.
The science of Business Intelligence As Syria progressively moves towards a liberalized economy, necessity, nature, and promise of Business Intelligence, especially as applied to the Syrian economic and geostrategic context become apparent.

Antony T. Sullivan is a senior scholar whose books and articles have appeared in such journals as Middle East Policy. This article was co-written by Muhammad A.Agha, Managing Partner for Business Intelligence with Strategic Axis Advisors LLC.