Investment in business intelligence (BI) is costly initially, but return on investment improves as businesses mature their competency. The best way to maximise that return is to build a best-in-class competency, by focusing on ongoing maintenance in a few, key areas.
A report by Aberdeen Group in May this year says: “IT and business management are increasingly expressing alarm at rising costs associated with business intelligence implementations.”
The report: “Managing the Total Cost of Ownership of Business Intelligence”, reveals that best-in-class companies get far better results from their BI implementations in sticking to budgets, decreasing the cost per user, achieve faster BI project completion times, and can make changes to BI reports or analytic views in under five hours.
Costs associated with BI implementation projects are dependent on factors such as project management, BI readiness, quality of the requirements definition, the BI implementation approach or methodology, the organisation's size and budgets, skills matching and deployment schedules, and operational competencies.
Those are the factors that distinguish one business from another in being a BI laggard or a BI best-in-class user.
Ongoing maintenance of a BI project, with particular focus on those aspects, is crucial to reducing total cost of ownership. Most companies do have an ongoing maintenance cycle to reach a stage where information delivery system implementation costs are reduced and the resulting operational efficiencies are improved, but the best economic route is to review the business requirements dictated to by business strategy.
Identifying and rationalising, or de-duping, the business processes will ultimately lead to common models and processes that will only require resources and skills to address information delivery. A services-oriented architecture (SOA) practice is often used to assist this, but it must be supported by a strong governance process if it is to achieve significant success.
By rationalising the business processes and building data and information delivery competency around that, companies will ultimately arrive at a solution that fits, and thereafter only needs to be maintained, while leaving them to address fewer business processes. Maintenance costs of the data and information delivery systems are therefore proportionately lower.
Couple that to an SOA practice with strong governance support and it removes duplication and ensures that only appropriate information systems are employed for specific business processes, which are then only kept up to date and maintained.
It is the most cost-effective route to building a BI best-in-class competency that reduces total cost of ownership and maximises return on investment.
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