Enterprise Business Intelligence
Author: Vijay Reddy Gondesi, Practice Head, Global Business Intelligence
Due to the proliferation of data, there is a need for enterprises to gain insights to make better decisions. Companies are good in acquiring data over a period of years but poor in transforming that into meaningful information. BI (Business Intelligence) isn’t just reporting anymore.
Customers are demanding more BI capabilities beyond traditional query/reporting and OLAP functionality, to leverage innovation and growth arising from in-memory analytics, & service-oriented architecture. The longer term BI strategy should also include building strong Datawarehouse with powerful ETL capabilities and flexible data modeling and more importantly presentation layer comprising of KPIs/Dashboards i.e. capable of deploying globally via. web portals. This might include rationalization of multiple tools and vendors to make “One stop – One vision … One truth”. Ability to consolidate and report at enterprise level (globally) is a challenge due to existence of silo reporting solutions that were delivered from various platforms using different tools. This opened the door for Enterprise BI initiatives and made customers reach out to vendors with enterprise wide BI capabilities and tools. Vendor consolidation has happened and we see end to end solutions from major vendors (SAP Business objects, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft) in BI today than before.
What we have also seen clearly is that the focus and reach of BI has shifted from operational, tactical to more strategic i.e. how to Run the business in the past Vs Drive the business now. The increasing trend towards Service oriented architecture and Self service BI, BI Standardization, Platform agnostic solutions and BI on cloud is the way to go….
This is a long journey and it may take years to adopt an Enterprise BI strategy. It needs clear vision, executive support, governance process, efficient change management, and last but not least ‘selecting right platform/application’.
We want to hear your views on adopting Enterprise wide BI strategy starting from assessment of current architecture, understand business KPIs, building roadmap, setting up BI Competency center, and selecting the right platform.
In my next blog, I will talk more about establishing a BI Center of Excellence, levels of maturity in BI, and importance of Data architecture & governance in this entire journey.
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Tags: BI, Business Intelligence