| |
| Thought Paper |
| |
To BI or Not to BI |
| |
| Abstract |
Business Intelligence (BI) became very popular and got its due share of attention in the late '90s. By
then organizations realized the potential of information and what it means and takes to change data
into information. Much of the 90's success of BI partly came from the fact that it piggybacked on the
ERP wave. Several big business houses had gone through huge ERP implementations, and they
were now dying to have a tool that could tame the humongous data now available. Also, the
plunging costs of hardware and disc space made it possible for organizations to deploy BI solutions
with huge data warehouses.
An organization having a successful BI implementation has distinct advantages over its market
rivals. What it knows about its competitors, markets, customers, products, and operations allows it to
substantially increase revenues, reduce costs, and enhance profitability. To build BI, several
businesses have relied on a single source of information _ the transactional systems which run the
day-to-day operations of their companies. While these ERP, OLTP, and other transactional systems
do capture useful data about current operational status, they do not meet management's deeper
need to uncover trends and patterns that might be exploited to improve or build business value. ERP
systems have structural and operational characteristics that limit their usefulness and flexibility as a
BI solution because they have been tuned to maximize daily transactional activities.
Not all early adapters as well as 'wait-and-watch' implementers of BI solutions succeeded. Some of
these organizations now plan to completely restructure their BI strategy and based on that, come up
with a new design for a BI solution.
This paper does not intend to explain what is BI, but it makes an attempt to highlight some key factors that an organization needs to consider to determine whether it is ready to launch a BI solution and what it should ensure to make it work.
|
