Enterprise applications Toolkit

Reaping business intelligence's harvest

David Braue ZDNet Australia

Published: 05 Jan 2004 11:59 GMT

BI = Business Imperative
Problems with the distributed nature of business intelligence systems are not new, but finding a workable and universal solution has been much harder than simply identifying the problem. Data is inherently tied with the operational units where it's stored; even though the rise of enterprise resource planning has centralised business data, individual parts of the business still find many different ways to use that information.

Even more fun for the IT strategist, those ways often involve different tools that reflect each tool vendor's individual strengths. Cognos, for example, has long been strong in ad hoc data query processing, while SAS Institute's business performance focus has made its systems more of an applied business tool. Hyperion's roots in financial analysis are reflected in the structure of its current tools lineup, although its recent acquisition of query-based BI vendor Brio has rounded out Hyperion's capabilities.

In many cases, the tools' respective strengths provide systems that are most appropriate for the needs of a particular department. Yet multiplicity is the enemy of consistency, and the large number of BI platforms installed in the average company impedes efforts to standardise the handling and management of information across various parts of the business.

It's not just the information that's problematic, points out Russell Evans, sales and marketing director of Hyperion Australia. "Most companies have embraced BI and see a value from it, but it tends to be rear-window looking and [falls into] silos of power and requirement," he says.

"There's pressure on CFOs to greatly improve the clarity of their financial forecasts, but ERP is the domain of the CIO, and CFOs need to convince IT to give them the tools to provide greater levels of functionality. Unless chief executives and boards have really got their heads around behaviour from both a people and a systems perspective, getting past these silos presents a very big challenge for most organisations."

Although the problem is clear, the solution is not. Gartner recently predicted that this issue would persist within Global 2000 enterprises, which will continue to adopt "disparate and unrelated" BI systems well through 2005. By that point, the analyst firm warned, lack of integrated information could spell disaster as increasingly information-hungry executives find themselves unable to maintain the real-time, top-down perspective they so desperately need.

Timely reporting, after all, is the fuel for modern business -- particularly in public companies catering to risk-averse investors -- and it is often the companies with the best visibility of their performance that are able to maintain the most trust from investment markets and stakeholders. This trust cascades through the supply chain to suppliers and agents, and its dissolution can spell disaster.