Linking business intelligence with business results gives workers out in the field better tools to drive day-to-day operations and customers better ways to make informed purchases.
At the advent of business intelligence, the idea was to put
the right data and analytics in the hands of people who could make actionable
changes that improve the way business is done. Somewhere along the line, that
simple idea grew muddled.
BI systems grew up to be scattered across enterprises with
the wind, complicated and difficult to use by even the business analysts. As
enterprises assess how to move forward with their BI efforts, one of the
driving forces of these initiatives is to make BI simpler, easier to access by a
wide range of workers. In short, organizations want to bring BI back to its
philosophical roots.
“One of the promises of BI when I started was empowering
decision-makers and knowledge workers. It was to create pervasive BI and
leverage BI for everyone,” says Dyke Hensen, chief marketing officer for
PivotLink, who calls himself an old BI "oak tree" after 20 years in
the space. “The problem is that over the years a lot of these offerings became
very complex, very bloated and expensive.”
Hensen cites figures from The Data Warehousing Institute
annual survey that showed the median cost just to maintain BI applications alone
clocks in at around $235,000 per year. In his company’s case, Hensen says the
goal is to reduce the cost of maintenance by offering BI capabilities via a SAAS
(software-as-a-service) model to reduce not just the hardware and software
costs, but also the number of employees needed to maintain systems.
However, according to Nimitt Desai, business intelligence
and data warehousing lead for Deloitte Consulting, many organizations can’t
even feasibly begin to leverage SAAS until they begin to consolidate their BI
efforts. One major problem enterprises face today is the sheer number of BI
applications spread out over an organization. Desai says it is common to see
enterprises running well over 100 analytic environments that they must report
against.
“When you have hundreds of systems, then SAAS is a myth,” Desai
says. “But if you have a smaller amount of sources, I feel there is a big push
in that direction.”
This drive to consolidate sources is much more of a
possibility today than even two years ago with the push by major ERP vendors to
help bring BI out of the cold and under a larger operational umbrella.
Acquisitions such as the SAP pickup of
Business Objects last year are a sign of where the BI space is headed.
According to Wayne Eckerson, director of research and
services for The Data Warehousing Institute, this shift to bring together
operational systems and BI just makes sense.
“It is kind of odd that you have to switch contexts, if
you're an operational worker, from an operational app in order to open a dashboard
or a report to understand what the impact was of what you just did or see the
context of an action,” Eckerson says. “There is definitely an opportunity for
vendors to take that gap out of the BI office and embed BI right into
operational applications.”
edwPosted on: 07-14-09 | By: larryconsolidating multiple bi applications using a data cleansing tool may solve that problem. i think the issue though is deeper routed - maybe along the lines of additional costs to cleans the data, the time needed to building consensus and agreement among key stakeholders surrounding common data defenitions. I see this as the challenge of SAAS, not multiple applications, though that is certainly a consideration too.
Embedding BI into Operational Apps may not be good for productivityPosted on: 07-08-09 | By: VinAlthough i understand that the moves by the ERP vendors to acquire BI vendors and embed BI capabilities into their apps may seem altruistic--however the risk is, that it will expose customers to the risk of vendor standardization pressure across the enterprise.
Now one ERP vendor might fit the business requirements of the finance organization, or even the IT organization--but does that vendor automatically create the best products for the Field Force or Sales forces department? Do they really create the best marketing automation or CRM software for the organization? Customers will be forced to standardize on a vendor's application stack, which may or may not be the best choice for all users.
The reason why ERP vendors are so keen to acquire and integrate BI vendors is the huge growth opportunity it provides to tap into competitive accounts. BI is their stranglehold to support their standardization push--and customers need to be aware and BEWARE.
Best of breed application environments (despite extra licensing costs), reap great rewards in terms of productivity by business users. The solution is not to buy embedded analytics, but to purchase BI with an application independent BI vendor, and ensure that it can integrate across your ERP and other enterprise application data sources effectively.
