Feeding frenzy

John Haigh, Head of CRM at CPiO comments on the development of BI applications

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

After a few lean years, the current rush to embrace out of the box Business Intelligence tools - such as Sage BI - is creating a reseller feeding frenzy. The products certainly appear easy to deploy and use: Sage has developed predefined cubes that provide users of Sage Line 500 with immediate visibility across key areas - such as finance and CRM - without the need for expensive consultancy or development work.

For those organisations that have invested in alternative tools over the years only to leave the software languishing unused, due to the complexity of set up and the amount of bespoke work required to meet individual users' requirements, the innovation in BI is extremely appealing.

But however simple it may appear on the surface, used correctly BI is a phenomenally powerful tool that can transform business performance. It is, therefore, essential that organisations gain real understanding of what BI can deliver and how it can support specific business objectives prior to product choice and implementation.

For organisations familiar with the two dimensional report - and all its constraints - even understanding the potential of BI is a challenge. Add in a wide range of product options - Sage alone offers several - and it becomes clear that the BI purchase is not as simple as, perhaps, some resellers are suggesting.

If organisations are to maximise the BI investment, the reseller needs to play an important role in assessing business needs and then prioritising the BI deployment - whether that is the use of alerts, dashboards or detailed analysis of business performance.

With poor reseller support, there is a real danger that organisations will simply replicate their existing reporting solution with the enhanced insight provided by multi-dimensional business analysis, overlooking the considerable benefit that other aspects of the BI solution set can deliver.

The new BI tools are out of the box; they can be deployed quickly and deliver immediate benefit. But that does not mean there is no need for consultancy. The reseller community may be enjoying the easy revenue boost offered by growing SME adoption of BI, but just how many of those products will deliver real value if no attempt is made to understand business requirements?

BI - No excuses

The arrival of low cost, easy to deploy BI technology should result in the end of many standard business excuses. Firstly, rather than traditional two dimensional reports that are inflexible, provide little real business insight and prompt more management argument than business consensus, BI's single version of the truth can enable a fundamental transformation of both business understanding and business process.

Replacing the static weekly or monthly management report packs that cause so much debate with a flexible online information view that enables individuals to analyse a trusted, single information source against many criteria provides a real platform for business growth. Critically, it fundamentally releases the FD from time consuming reporting to gain a detailed understanding of trends in costs - such as an escalation in motor expenses - by offering drill down to transaction level information.

With no need to wait weeks for the IT department to crank out a new report, there is now nowhere for any senior manager to hide.

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