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Executive Summary
The Why
The convergence of enterprise reporting with sophisticated analytics in the form of enterprise business intelligence has made it not just possible but necessary to exploit information as a strategic asset. Achieving that convergence represents an extreme cost advantage for organizations. Reducing the number of vendors' tools will reduce software licensing and maintenance costs as well as hardware, support, and training costs. A strategy to standardize for informational consistency and organizational governance and compliance, coupled with the goal of tool consolidation to dramatically reduce IT operating costs, has become today's corporate mandate.
The How
This white paper builds on that mandate by providing the specific business and architectural success factors to consider when selecting one Enterprise Business Intelligence Suite (EBIS) to serve as the enterprise standard. Too often organizations select a standard BI technology on the basis of the success they have had with a departmental solution already in place. This paper provides a more objective and ultimately safer set of criteria.
The success factors that an appropriate EBIS solution should support are listed below and explored in this paper:
n Targeting highest-ROI opportunities n Leveraging the existing data architecture n Meeting enterprise end-user requirements n Ensuring maximum scalability and manageability n Minimizing total cost of ownership
The convenient feature checklist attached as an appendix should be used within the context of the success factors.
Why Standardize Now?
Eliminate Waste
The best way to grow revenue in today's business environment is to increase profitability while limiting costs. Waste is a company's biggest enemy, because it goes right to the bottom line.
Until recently, if a company's employees needed to perform ad hoc querying, reporting, or analysis, they purchased a specific product for each activity. This had the effect of creating costly silos of business intelligence (BI) technology within the organization, as each division or department pursued its own information-handling priorities. It is common today to see 5, 10, 20 ? even 30 ? different vendors' tools solving BI problems in a single organization, with little or no coordination between the applications they are used to construct.
Cost inefficiencies from siloed BI technologies include: n Multiple vendor licenses n Multiple methodologies n Unnecessary hardware n Increased training expense for support personnel n No cost-saving bulk end-user training programs
Create Information Consistency and Organizational Transparency
Information silos also work against information consistency. Unless two people in different parts of the organization can ask the same question and get the same answer, it is difficult if not impossible to generate and share information across lines of business ? a prerequisite for maximized business performance.
Facilitate Collaboration
Traditionally, enterprise reporting applications have been provided for line-of-business staff, while sophisticated analysis was employed by business analysts ? and never the twain did meet. A line-of-business employee simply could not share the same report with an analyst to collaborate on a problem. Today, enterprise reporting and sophisticated analysis have converged, making products available that integrate comprehensive BI functions within a single enterprise suite.
That makes it possible to standardize on one technology for all business intelligence needs throughout the enterprise. A single standard technology makes excellence in the handling and use of corporate information a cost-effective way to drive revenue and increase profitability. For example, people can collaborate within their department, across business units, and even with partners to solve critical problems without regard to role or analytical skill.
Achieve Compliance
Compliance with government and industry reporting standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the Patriot Act, Basel III, and HIPAA is a huge corporate burden today. The auditability and accuracy implicit in these standards makes it imperative to automate data handling, but automation can only be achieved with a single enterprise BI solution.
A good business intelligence strategy should allow an organization to meet compliance requirements while simultaneously deriving ROI benefits from optimized processes or improved performance.
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