The demands on a business today--increased global competition, lower barriers to entry, lower profit margins--are creating an ever-increasing need for access to data. The ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time is, therefore, more important than ever; however, the sheer volume of available data makes such a proposition increasingly challenging...
Organizations that are the most successful at collecting, evaluating and applying information are consistently the leaders in their respective industries. The ability to act faster and more effectively than the competition can be the defining advantage in today's marketplace. As companies look to BI solutions in order to address these challenges, BI software has become a multibillion dollar market. But a BI solution is more than a suite of software tools, it's an essential and continuously expanding activity focused on accessing, analyzing and acting on data to meet business needs. The unending search for data-driven insight continues to draw in new, more powerful technology but also demands increasingly creative approaches to applying the right knowledge to improve business processes and performance.
Major trends in BI implementation involve front-end tools and back-end infrastructure, as well as the transformation of business processes. At the front end, browser-based BI tools and dashboards are evolving the view of information away from standard reports, toward metrics and key performance indicators. On the back end, regulatory compliance puts pressure on IT to ensure high data quality. Strategic business objectives are forcing organizations to break down information so enterprise BI and performance management tools can gain a single view of customers. Better infrastructure will lower BI costs and let organizations serve the right information at the right time.
Paul Alexander, Head of Global Consumer Markets for dunnhumby, states that: "Successful companies today will be those who can harness the significant amounts of data they have at their fingertips, and make sense of it. Most organizations have mistakenly taken this as meaning that they need to collect data and report on it. Simply reporting on data falls far short of providing the organization with insight which can take action. BI is about reporting on it, providing the insight which finds the list of 200 things the organization could do; but most importantly defines the 10 which will make the biggest impact to the bottom line."
Market consolidation is also driving platform convergence. Most of the leading BI vendors have been buying technologies to broaden their functional capacities. An example of this is Business Objects.
With its acquisition of Firstlogic Inc. in April 2006, Business Objects now provides best-of-breed data quality solutions as part of its long-term strategy to offer customers a trusted foundation for enterprise information management. "Data quality is critical to helping companies resolve a myriad of challenges, from ensuring regulatory compliance, to managing expanding numbers of data sources, to linking data to business performance," said Donald MacCormick, Vice President of Product Marketing at Business Objects. "Without trusted information, organizations face a major roadblock to the success of business intelligence and performance management initiatives. Data quality is a key pillar of our overall EIM strategy, which is designed to help prevent the spread of poor data throughout their enterprise and BI infrastructure, and at the same time, ensure that users can trust the information on which they base their business decisions."
As performance management nears the top of the investment priority list in many companies today, it is no surprise that BI is seen as a tactical means to a bigger end. A major draw of enterprise BI is to apply the technology to reorient business performance and execution. BI vendors, once limited to query, reporting, and analysis, are increasingly adding performance management analytics on top of their core platforms. In doing so they are hoping to increase BI data outside the realm of the traditional 'power users' and business analysts to propagate the entire enterprise--across middle management, up to the executive suite, and even down to operational workers--via scorecards and dashboards for daily comparison to strategic goals and budget targets.
BI vendors, particularly those that bought their way into performance management, face another stiff integration challenge to fuse together their BI with performance management systems. Specialist system integration and consulting firm, Detica, which focuses on intelligence systems, has seen the volume and complexity of technology and process integration challenges grow rapidly over the past twelve months.
As business intelligence continues, it’s quickly moving into one of the most strategic and important investments for businesses today. With this in mind it is critical that companies leverage the right resources to implement these solutions and involve experienced people, including professional services and technical expertise that are closely aligned with the business objectives. This helps to provide a crucial role in ensuring success by minimizing risk while providing rapid return on an investment.
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