The BI Tool Conundrum

The untold reality of BI tools

By Mark Smith

Which business intelligence (BI) tool products can meet your overall business requirements for accessing, analyzing, and delivering information that is in context and aligned to an individual's role and responsibility? Generic marketing and product information is blurring the lines of functionality. You are facing tough choices as well as confusion from the industry and among IT and business professionals on which BI tools can meet the needs of your organization.

What are BI tools? This software category focuses on the functional areas of information delivery, query and reporting, analysis, and planning applications that, in general, any individual in the business network can use. It should also include the capability to build applications that more closely align to particular needs of organizations or along a business process. I will not discuss any issues related to planning, as these capabilities have mostly not been integrated into any of the products in the other functional areas.

But how can you deploy information and provide analysis capabilities not only to your internal employees, business analysts, power users, and the general population, but also across to your customers, partners, and suppliers. So far, most companies have only deployed these capabilities to a small percentage of the total employees. This column should give you some insight and direction for leveraging BI tools.

THE CHALLENGES TO BI

Businesses face many challenges that require fully leveraging information to enable individuals to respond to increases in the speed of business cycles and optimize resources and relationships, increasing business processes' efficiency and the effectiveness in interacting across the entire business network. Of course, decreasing costs and increasing revenue to meet profitability and expected financial earnings are bottom-line mandates with which everyone must align and focus their efforts.

The growing number of individuals along the business network and the increasing volumes of data are putting extreme pressures on IT to provide a robust set of tools for power users and simplicity in information accessibility and delivery. Businesses are looking to empower more individuals to be more responsive and productive in their roles and responsibilities. In addition, they want to ensure that IT cannot only provide these capabilities but also guarantee that the information is relevant, timely, and most importantly, accurate.

Sound familiar? It should, because this goal has been the focus of the last 10 years of BI tools' evolution, from enterprise reporting, OLAP, ad hoc query, and managed query environments.

Unfortunately, many companies get caught up in the sales and marketing hype of vendors and believe that one vendor's product or suite can fulfill all their BI tool requirements. Or they believe that using one vendor may be the only way to get the total cost of ownership (hardware, software, and people) within an acceptable range. However, all these approaches have generally been problematic, leaving many companies' lofty goals unmet and large amounts of software undeployed.