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August 10, 2001

The BI Tool Conundrum

The untold reality of BI tools

By Mark Smith

Continued from Page 1

SUGGESTED APPROACH

You need to start by understanding what you're trying to accomplish and the best approach. Many companies fail to understand their business requirements first before choosing the appropriate tools; instead, they start the other way around. Whether you have an enterprise or departmental project, determining the right approach and short-listing vendors for evaluation is the most difficult aspect of BI tool projects.

TECHNOLOGY EVALUATION CATEGORIES

YOU SHOULD USE THESE CRITERIA WHEN EVALUATING POTENTIAL BI TOOLS:

1. Usability: Providing self-sufficiency to individuals and information and analysis accessibility at any place and any time.

2. Integration: Integrating information from inside and outside of an organization requires a robust platform and architecture.

3. Manageability: Managing BI deployments requires administration to support user communities.

4. Reliability: Addressing strategic and tactical BI requires user and information scalability and performance.

5. Functionality: Matching user communities needs requires specific features and capabilities.

6. Adaptability: Meeting business requirements typically requires customization and development of specific functionality.

You begin with a comprehensive project plan that includes business requirements that group user communities (management, business analysts, power users, and information consumers) need to fulfill technology evaluation requirements (see the sidebar, "Technology Evaluation Categories" at left). If you're attempting to standardize across the organization, build a virtual committee of both business and IT staff that can help span organizational boundaries and cultural issues. From this foundation, you should inventory your existing products and determine their ability to meet the business requirements.

After performing this task, you may believe that, on average, one tool can meet all your needs. In addressing some of the BI tools' functional areas this conclusion may be correct, but across all areas, I would suggest that this is impossible. BI tool functional areas still have significant gaps in their ability to span across user communities, which puts significant strain on vendors' supporting technology. Stay away from vendor platforms that generate silo architectures or prevent you from fully leveraging your existing investments. Find vendors with platforms that support not only their products but also others' and have a strategy for integrating BI tools with your performance management or enterprise applications investments.

Many companies have purchased products for query and reporting or analysis functional needs and found limited broad information delivery and application development have stalled projects. These companies are now painfully attempting to determine how to leverage the existing BI tool investment while choosing a multivendor strategy to meet all their needs.

You will also find that vendors load BI tool products with features targeted for power users, which meets only a fraction of the total user community needs. Instead, you need a performance metric monitoring and intelligent delivery capability based on user profiles that overall require little IT involvement. This feature lets users log on, select metrics, and set thresholds and related notifications through any delivery mechanism (email, voice, wireless, or Web).

RECOMMENDATION

Building effective project plans with business and functional requirements should help you match your needs to the technology evaluation criteria. This approach is easy to say but difficult to accomplish, as many companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in different tools across the organization. Many companies still resist change or have cultural issues in consolidating BI tools in functional areas, but they must focus on the benefit to the entire organization, not just a specific user community.

Many organizations have built committees and task forces to find that one, all-inclusive BI tool; instead, you should focus on how to build a product portfolio that can benefit the entire organization. Although eliminating product overlap in individual or grouped functional areas is possible, you should find tools that complement each other and that don't significantly increase IT overhead on integration and maintenance.

So take the time to truly understand your short- and long-term business needs and develop a product strategy that aligns products and capabilities to the user groups' business requirements. Reassess your current approach, take nothing for granted, and perform a full functional and technology review to ensure a vendor will meet your needs over the long term.

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Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is president and founder of Full Circle Strategies and an industry analyst in the applied use of information through leveraging analytics, business intelligence, and performance management.

RESOURCES

BI Tools Providers (information delivery, query and reporting, analysis, and application development)

Actuate Corp.: www.actuate.com

AlphaBlox Corporation Inc.: www.alphablox.com

Brio Technology Inc.: www.brio.com

Business Objects: www.businessobjects.com

Cognos Inc.: www.cognos.com

CorVu Corp.: www.corvu.com

Crystal Decisions (formerly Seagate Software): www.crystaldecisions.com

Hyperion Solutions Corp.: www.hyperion.com

InfoRay Inc.: www.inforay.com

Information Builders: www.ibi.com