A business intelligence brief

CXO speaks with AMR Research Director Dave Kasabian about business intelligence: a force for good in your enterprise.

CXO. How is the business intelligence landscape changing? What have been the drivers?
DK. There has been significant acquisition and consolidation in this space. Many of the major BI players have expanded their offerings to include performance management applications. Another trend has been to create vertical BI solutions (financial services, retail, etc) to better meet the needs of specific industries. The driver of these changes has been the cost of developing and maintaining custom applications as well as the potential for commoditization of the market by the entry of Microsoft into the BI space.

CXO. Many businesses are put off business intelligence because of its complexity and cost. Are they correct in their assumptions?
DK. Historically, enterprise-wide BI implementations have been expensive and there have been some major failures. There several major components to the past failures. A couple to note are the complexity of the solutions, the amount of IT support required, performance issues, and in correct or inconsistent data. Many of these issues can be better dealt with now than they could in the past. Today’s technology is easier to implement and performs better, the solutions are easier to use, and field master data management has helped companies develop consistent data definitions across the business.

CXO. Is there an increase in the number of business adopting BI solutions? Why?
DK. There is an increase in adoption. Part of that is driven by the historical challenges being dealt with better today as outlined above. Another driving factor is the competitive advantage it can provide. The promise of BI today is to empower better decision-making by providing more people in the organisation with the right information, at the right time, in the right format. What senior executive wouldn’t want that? At the same time the price point for BI from both a license and support perspective is decreasing making BI fiscally viable to more organisations.
 
Another driver is that there are many smaller BI vendors who offer quick, low cost, departmental solutions that are being implemented to address very specific needs of a given department. While this can create challenges by having multiple BI solutions in an organisation it is helping to expand the number of organisations that are adopting BI solutions.

CXO. Is there a big current trend in use of BI as a data warehouse platform, or BI front-end tools, or performance management? Can you tell us a little bit about this?
DK. To a major extent the data warehouse strategy depends on the organisation. Businesses with huge volumes of data and query complexity will want to consider a more traditional data warehouse platform. Other business may opt for a data mart approach leveraging the BI platform for data storage. There is no one right answer to this, it really depend on the needs of the business, performance requirements, and use cases. This is a decision that should not be taken lightly and it is our recommendation to obtain professional advice before making such a decision. We also highly recommend discussions with peer organisations. There is much to learn from those that have gone down this path before and it can be surprising how willing companies are to discuss their experiences.
 
As vendors position “BI for the Enterprise” they have had to make BI front-end tools much easier to use and deploy. The future potential of BI (both to vendors and the user community) is tied to expanded deployment across the enterprise. Given this, we will continue to see a focus by vendors on making front-end tools more open, easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to navigate, and easy to maintain. For BI tools the trend is easy.
 
As mentioned above, larger vendors (BI and other vendors) are making significant investments in acquisitions of performance management vendors. This shows that the trend is, and will continue to be, to expand past core BI and into a platform on which BI and performance management applications reside. We can expect to see further consolidation/acquisition as vendors continue to expand the performance management capabilities of their platforms.

CXO. What mistakes should potential customers be aware of when choosing and deploying BI tools?
DK. As mentioned above, leverage the professional and peer expertise that is available to help make these decisions.
 
Involve the business in the decision. It is ultimately the business users adopting and finding value in a BI solution that will determine success or failure. Make sure they are involved and buy-in to the decision to create a sense of ownership and commitment to the decision.
 
Understand the corporate culture and the impact BI will have on the culture. While BI, when done right, will provide significant value to the organisation, it is important to position the value it will provide to business operations in addition to senior management.

Dave Kasabian, Research Director, AMR Research, Inc.
Dave Kasabian brings more than 20 years of business experience within performance management and business intelligence to his position as a research director in AMR Research’s Enterprise Strategies Service group. In his current role, Dave provides research and best practice analysis in performance management strategies, processes, and technologies. Dave helps clients realise benefits from their investments in performance management processes and technology. Dave received his BA from the University of New Hampshire.