It seems hard to believe that less than 10 years ago we had to start every presentation to a potential client with "What is Business Intelligence?".
In those days, we were first educating our clients on why they needed to make investments in this area. Only if they "got it", would we step into understanding their business and the underlying requirements and eventually determine and justify the project based on an ROI.
This took a lot of work to do. Some clients quickly "got it", while others took a few more years before they eventually did.
Now, looking at the consolidated landscape of the BI/BPM industry, and the full acceptance of "BI" and "BPM/CPM/EPM", it isn't a question of whether to invest in BI, but rather with whom.
Yes, it is refreshing not to have to explain the benefits of a BI Platform anymore. It truly has allowed us to focus on getting the job done for our clients.
But what does this mean for firms looking to implement a Business Intelligence solution who have been approached by a traditional ERP VAR of either Oracle or SAP?
It means they shouldn't be fooled by a generalist attempting to sell into this new space. We have seen many failed attempts from firms looking to enter this space without a solid background in the functional and technical expertise required to make it work.
Yes, there is good and bad when it comes to market acceptance. BI is now a generally accepted "makes sense to invest in" technology. But the same issues that have driven the need for specialists in this space continue to exist. The need for consultants to understand not just the bits and bytes, but the the real practical business drivers behind the effort and the project management skills required to gain full acceptance.
BI Projects are very different than your typical top down IT project. For example, they need to be tuned to end user needs in an iterative approach. It takes many design modification cycles with the actual report to determine what will truly be best for the organization to use.
At first glance, any new report or analytic application looks great. But the reality is, the sizzle wears off and without the proper iterative design up front, these systems do not produce the measures and underlying support (detail) data to support change and quickly lose their luster.
This is a just one area of the design and rollout that requires persons very familiar with BI project development to be involved.
OK, I'll get off my soap box now.
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With recent consolidation in the BI and BPM space, one sees how Finance drove the final stages of the BI revolution.
On the customer side, BI evolved into BPM as as the need for consolidated financial data in reporting/analytics grew. At the same time, "Tomorrow's news ... Today" (also know as the forecasting or planning process) became critical to most organizations. Why report on tomorrow, when you can get a glimpse of the future?
On the vendor side, the bigger software players (Oracle, SAP, etc.) were able to flex their market capitalization muscles and acquire significant product lines to complement their software suites.
In the end, while customer choices have narrowed for most folks (and prices will increase), the benefits of an integrated solution will provide significant long-term benefit to many.
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