A recent worldwide survey listed business intelligence (BI) as CIOs' number one priority for 2008, the third consecutive year BI topped the list. In this light, organizations that run SAP software should perform due diligence on solutions from SAP and from Business Objects, an SAP company. New milestones in areas such as user experience and information integration, from both business-user and enterprise-IT perspectives, will be hard to ignore under such a mandate.
®Designing Compelling Business Intelligence Business Cases for an SAP Software Landscape:Scenarios for Leveraging Solutions from SAP and Business Objects
Inforte - A Business & Decision CompanyDavid Dixon and Jean-Michel Franco
Sponsored by® WHITE PAPER - Designing Compelling Business Intelligence Business Cases for an SAP Software Landscape: 1Scenarios for Leveraging Solutions from SAP and Business Objects
TABLE OF CONTENTS1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY................................................................................................................1
2.0 THE CASE FOR SAP AND BUSINESS OBJECTS ..........................................................................22.1 Value Creation for Business Users ..........................................................................................32.1.1 Making BI Interactive............................................................................................................32.1.2 Making BI Pervasive.............................................................................................................52.2 Value Creation by Enterprise IT..............................................................................................72.2.1 Consolidating or Federating Data ..........................................................................................82.2.2 Managing Information as a Strategic Asset...........................................................................102.2.3 Reconciling Structured and Unstructured Data .......................................................................122.3 Value Co-Creation by Both Business User and Enterprise IT.....................................................142.3.1 Delivering Enterprise Tools and Services to the Business .........................................................152.3.2 Accelerating Time to Delivery ..............................................................................................18
3.0 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................19
4.0 LIST OF PRODUCTS DISCUSSED IN THE PAPER .......................................................................20
1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARYA recent worldwide survey listed business intelligence (BI) as CIOs' number one priority for 2008, the third consecutive year1 ®BI topped the list. In this light, organizations that run SAP software should perform due diligence on solutions from SAP andfrom Business Objects, an SAP company. New milestones in areas such as user experience and information integration, fromboth business-user and enterprise-IT perspectives, will be hard to ignore under such a mandate.
From a business user perspective, this translates into more interactive and pervasive BI, both creating a richer user experienceand reaching every place where work is done. As enterprise productivity increasingly depends on knowledge work, enablingbusiness users becomes critical to success. Most business users are information consumers, taking a more active role inproblem solving through the use of empowering tools that perform deeper forms of analysis. This self-service liberates thebusiness user from reliance on IT for all information requests, and thus helps clear IT backlogs.
In addition, there are new BI richness and reach scenarios that the SAP world has not seen before. BusinessObjectsXcelsius set the standard for a whole new product category called interactive visualization. Similarly, BusinessObjectsPolestar is part of an innovative new product class of easy-to-use guided analysis that eliminates the need for any reportor query development from scratch. Meanwhile, common workspaces such as mobile devices, Microsoft Office and evenyour desktop will deliver access to information easier than ever before through BusinessObjects Mobile, BusinessObjectsLive Office and BI Widgets, respectively.
From an enterprise IT perspective, there are now new ways to integrate data, whether via consolidation or federation,including structured or unstructured data. Trends in mergers and acquisitions, customer focus, partner networks, legislation,disruptive innovations and globalization drive the need for investments in BI standardization and information integration toovercome the challenge of heterogeneous data repositories. Heterogeneous application and data environments areincreasingly ... [download for more]
