Business intelligence (BI) has become one of the CIO`s top priorities, as companies have recognised the need to improve and support business-decision capabilities with information delivery, says an industry expert.
Oliver Oursin, Cognos associate VP, recently visited SA and featured as a guest speaker at the Cognos roadshow that highlighted the group`s latest BI development - Cognos 8 BI.
Oursin noted that a recent Gartner survey lists BI applications as the CIO`s second most important business and technology priority, after security. However, he said, BI has also emerged as a priority for business executives who need to monitor and measure performance as part of the corporate performance management (CPM) agenda.
"Further research by Gartner highlights two major reasons for buying a BI solution: users need data on a timely basis; and they need speedy information delivery that improves decision-making abilities. Not much has changed since the early requirements of BI, although, when elevated to a more strategic level, user pains become apparent as a direct result of multiple BI technologies being deployed at a departmental level," Oursin added.
Fundamental user needs
These "pain points" include: users with different requirements have different needs; access to multiple data sources; diverse platforms and security systems; global deployment and the requirement for multilingual support; and too many BI technologies employed.
This gave rise to three fundamental user needs, Oursin said, including an environment that supports many ICT infrastructures, security and data; a single platform for BI/CPM that brings multiple disciplines together; and enterprise-class products that offer scalability, performance, manageability and reliability. What became apparent, he stated, was the need for a single Web-based service-oriented architecture, an essential component of successful CPM.
"To address these needs, businesses need to look at solutions that offer all BI capabilities within one platform, ultimately reducing complexity. The spin-off advantages that a single platform delivers are substantial. It standardises the way users receive information and offers one representation of data rather than disjointed views from disparate BI solutions. It also offers a significant saving on maintenance as support is required for one product with one skill set," Oursin said.
In addition, he noted, collapsing many functions into one solution, including scorecards and metrics, dashboarding, dimensional reporting, deep comparative analysis, planning and event management, leverages many added advantages as the trend moves away from 'siloed` systems to an integrated approach.
Oursin said the emergence of Web-enabled BI has also created ease of deployment in multi-site environments. However, this gave rise to another conundrum - language. It is important for solutions to feature Unicode which presents all types of data in all languages within one application, he said.
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