Capitalising on your business intelligence

The data currently held by your servers is arguably your most valuable business resource. It has the ability to alert you to important trends.

It enables analysis and, in turn, can focus strategic decisions and influence your company's performance. All of this will, however, remain latent potential without the right business intelligence (BI) tools, says Jeremy Waterman, MD of Softline ACCPAC.

And, with so many tools on the market, it's no longer sufficient to know which does what, customers and users also need to follow the trends influencing their development.

Waterman explains that we're currently seeing BI deployment expanding significantly as companies try to tap the vast volumes of data captured by their ERP and CRM applications and data warehouses.

"While previous BI deployments were focused on 'power users', we're now seeing a far wider need for information dissemination. Companies need to share data with far more users than ever before. By allowing more users access to this information, they can improve everything from delivery time to inventory control, and thereby influence their performance in a very positive way."

With demand influencing this space and driving development, more standardisation is also taking place, significantly reducing costs. Single vendor sourcing is also playing more of a role in BI. Waterman explains that standardisation of tools and the accompanying development of cross-platforms has enabled IT to become more responsive to business needs by focusing on a standard set of BI tools.

"In this way, companies don't waste money investing in overlapping, redundant tools. Applications thus work more closely with the business and can integrate like never before." He adds that with vendors developing very aggressively in this space and encouraging add-on and complementary product development, customers can leverage both a vendor's product line capability expansion and the integrated services it offers.

As for reporting functionality and capabilities, users can expect these to continue becoming more sophisticated. "Reporting will continue driving BI initiatives - especially from a business perspective. Despite having complex analytical capabilities at their fingertips, we still see clients who just want their daily or weekly reports to see how the business is doing.

"What we're trying to encourage as solution providers, however, is that certain staff are trained to use the more intricate functionality and understand and interpret complex analyses, thereby really utilising all of the tools as opposed to a small percentage of them."

Waterman adds that the strategic advantages are often hidden in the details: "The reports your BI tool delivers support parameter-driven enquiries - allowing you to drill down to the interesting details of your business and make decisions accordingly."

And, while larger corporates are arguably already taking full advantage of BI, mid-tier and smaller enterprises are also starting to realise its business benefits. Because products have become more mature and associated costs have correspondingly decreased, smaller firms now have greater access to the business benefits of BI.

Business intelligence solutions thus look set to continue revolutionising the way companies do business and approach strategy. By using these powerful tools to access the secrets stored in their data, organisations can unleash powerful competitive advantage and essentially capitalise on their data by using it as opposed to merely storing it.