Panorama Business Intelligence

With all the BI vendors, consultants and service providers trying to see their BI solutions and services, it is becoming really challenging for companies to understand what is the best way to evaluate the best BI strategy for their organization. 

Some BI vendors try to over simplify and position themselves as the “one stop shop” for BI. While this might sound ideal at first, in many cases this is only ideal for the BI vendor and not necessarily for the customer. 

In today’s world I would argue that it is impossible to find one shop that has it all. True, best of bread is not idea either…. So what should customers do?

Here are 5 simple steps to walk through when considering a BI solution:

Step 1 – start by looking at your most important and strategic line of business applications. Are you using Oracle applications? SAP? This is probably where you should start

Step 2 – look at what that LOB vendor provides from a BI Perspective: usually these vendors provide the most powerful tools to build the data layer (ETL, Data warehouse, OLAP). Then look at their BI applications. Are they intuitive? Do you end users like them? Do they enable self service reporting?

Step 3 – look at the other data sources you have in your organizations. Is it possible to bring it in to the data platform provided by your main LOB system (example, if you use SAP and have BW is it possible to bring data into BW)?

Step 4 – if data cannot be brought into one platform look at the best “data agnostic” BI platforms out there. A great example is Microsoft SQL Server Analysis services.

Step 5 – in many cases you will find the front end tools provided by the LOB vendor you use to lack in terms of usability and performance. This is the time to start evaluating the best front end tools for your needs. The tools you chose MUST be the ones that not only provide the best usability and performance but first of all have to be the ones that are the best fit for the platforms you chose to use.