Business intelligence is coming of age, but…

“Don’t be tempted by executive dashboards and other shiny toys,” warns Calum Nobles, technical director at integration adapters and business intelligence software and services provider Information Builders. “Information is the key to many of your problems, and business intelligence can solve more problems than you might think – but you need to look at the pain points in your business and aim to solve those. That’s how you’ll deliver the real ROI [return on investment] of BI.” Nobles sees the BI market opening up increasingly for bigger-picture business users, especially with the newer developments from Microsoft opening potential users’ minds to the possibilities. “Microsoft offers a strong value proposition to some users, particularly if they’re Microsoft shops through and through and their data is all on SQL Server databases. The current offerings – reporting services and integration with Office tools – are very appealing. “But Microsoft doesn’t solve the problem of delivering information to tens of thousands of users. And a lot of companies are much more complicated than that anyway. “The more complicated and horrible the environment, or the more they need to report across their businesses, the better it is for us. We have the adapters and the experience to be able to extract and aggregate that information and push it out to users.” His point: people are starting to accept, use and want more operational, pervasive levels of BI. “Companies are realising that it’s not enough to deliver information to the FD and the planners. To get real value you have to deliver information to those executing the business itself.” So the issue then is one of data extraction and aggregation from legacy systems – but also intuitive reporting. “Information workers want reports that sort, slice and dice information in a very simple way. If you have to teach users how to use it, then you have to deal with adoption problems and people that may not want to understand how to deal with cubes.”