The aim of business intelligence (BI) is honourable. You need data to make a decision and wouldn’t it be fantastic if the exact data you needed was at your fingertips?

BI is meant to help employees make good decisions based on relevant data in a timely manner. But how often is the information you want in the head of the person who just left the firm? Or locked in a spreadsheet on the C: drive of the employee who pulled together the data in the first place? And how do you decide in advance what you will need for decision making?

In addition to these challenges, there is an increasing number of data sources and these sources are fragmented. Not only must workers contend with traditional sources, which sees data held in spreadsheets, they also have to consider new ones – social media activity relating to a company brand, traffic to the company web site and global markets data that may or may not hold the secret as to whether there is demand for a business idea.

In our in-depth guide to the BI market and technologies, we speak to consumer goods company Diageo, best known for household brands such as Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker, about its use of BI and analytics platform SAP; and to London South Bank University, which is using IBM’s business analytics software to monitor students’ progress and analyse course performance.

This is the age of the smartphone, with apps that let you shop online, check your email and even monitor your alcohol intake. It’s a trend that has largely been driven by the consumer, with the still-fashionable Apple iPhone leading the market.

So how can enterprises take advantage of this burgeoning mobile market?

Coca-Cola was an early pioneer of mobile commerce (m-commerce), installing mobile phone-enabled vending machines in Helsinki, Finland more than a decade ago, which took payment via text messages.

And today the global mobile entertainment market is worth an estimated £23.3bn per year, which
includes m-commerce payments made by consumers along with revenue generated through advertising in exchange for content, such as ringtones and logos.

In our in-depth guide we explore how these and other sectors are taking advantage of mobile technologies to strengthen customer loyalty and open up new revenue streams.

Money transfer giant Western Union, for example, explains how teaming up with mobile operators has enabled it to reach millions of potential customers in the developing world.

In addition, Jon Fell and Victoria Diggines of law firm Pinsent Masons highlight some of the key legal questions raised by m-commerce.

IT leaders are well placed to save their organisations money by implementing technologies that can reduce increasingly costly carbon emissions.

There is a wide choice of technology available that can cut energy use and thereby reduce emissions. Some of these technologies were designed specifically to lower energy consumption, while with others power efficiency is more of a secondary benefit. Virtualisation technologies, for example, began with a focus on saving space but also help reduce energy consumption.

Banking group HSBC has rolled out technology to manage power on 300,000 computers, reducing total cost of ownership and bolstering its environmental credentials in the process.

Our Essential Guide to green IT looks at this and several other, similar initiatives.

It also examines the impact of the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency scheme. The legislation, which came into force on 1 April 2010, began as a carrot-and-stick approach to reducing carbon consumption but has more recently been transformed into a carbon tax.

The issue here that IT leaders need to think about is whether a stringent carbon tax regime will force datacentres offshore or whether concerns over data privacy, latency and comparable carbon targets in other regions will stop this happening.

There is increasing regulatory pressure on organisations to cut power consumption and thereby reduce their carbon footprint. While IT can be a major consumer of power, it can also play a significant part in cutting it.

Companies setting up new datacentres can benefit from the latest power management technologies to keep consumption down. Social networking giant Facebook, for example, is spending $450m (£290m) on a new datacentre in Salt Lake City. But for many firms the only option is to upgrade existing facilities and this isn’t simple.

In the first part of our two-part guide to datacentres we examine the innovative technologies that can help.

Virtualisation  can enable server consolidation, but there is also increased interest in the virtualisation of data storage capacity. And storage virtualisation can be supplemented by data de-duplication, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored in the first place.

Companies are also rebuilding datacentre networks to take out surplus routers and switches, while networking vendors are promoting the concept of the unified datacentre fabric to increase speeds while keeping costs down.

As well as looking at the technology, our guide also includes advice from infrastructure experts and IT leaders who have succeeded in making their IT estates more energy efficient.

The corporate network isn't the first consideration when business leaders are looking to identify the impact of new IT services that can improve business competitiveness or save the company money.

When considering the move to cloud computing, for example, businesses will first consider the potential benefits of increased flexibility and efficiency and reduced cost. But the impact of cloud computing on the network can be substantial, and it is unwise to overlook the consequences.

Similarly, the use of video in large enterprises is rising sharply as companies look to save travel time and money with telepresence and desktop collaboration tools, but the use of such tools can have an impact on network performance if their implementation is not managed.

Meanwhile, the use of virtualisation technologies has seen an upturn. Enterprise virtualisation software wasn't widely used prior to the 2008 economic dip but this year most businesses are trialling virtualisation projects or rolling them out enterprise-wide.

With businesses getting excited about the possibility of video on the network, cloud computing and virtualisation, it's time to consider the impact that these trends will have on the network.

In our guide to tomorrow's network today we take a look at each of these issues and consider how businesses can take advantage of new technologies without slowing the network to a halt.

See also: The impact of virtualisation on the network and The impact of cloud computing on the network.