PART 2 of 3: Decreasing your Business Intelligence Total Cost of Ownership

At the end of March, Rita Sallam from Gartner published the report “BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownership.” A fifteen minute survey was completed by 1,225 BI professionals across the globe, of which 20% didn’t come from a vendor reference list. We thought it would be helpful to interpret the results and include our insights from being on the ground for several implementations.

If you would like to DECREASE your total cost of ownership, the following tidbits of advice will help justify your Business Intelligence investments:

3.  Optimize capabilities

Questions about current BI environment: Is your company using all capabilities of the technology acquired? Did you match the technology to established business requirements and use cases?

Suggestion to optimize capabilities: Evaluate business use cases and match capabilities/technology accordingly, keeping business invested in value and impact of system to increase adoption.

4.  Decrease complexity of Business Intelligence environment

Questions about current BI environment: Did you architect the system in such a way that maximizes technology strengths and mitigate risk, leaving an easy to maintain and scalable architecture? Did you evaluate skill level of in-house and system integration resources? Did you recently evaluate new technologies for potential savings?

Suggestion to decrease complexity: Use strategic partner with “real life” implementation experience for a variety of Business Technologies.

Stay tuned for more information on managing ad-hoc requests and accurately measuring TCO.

PART 1 of 3: Decreasing your Business Intelligence Total Cost of Ownership

At the end of March, Rita Sallam from Gartner published the report “BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownership.” A fifteen minute survey was completed by 1,225 BI professionals across the globe, of which 20% didn’t come from a vendor reference list. We thought it would be helpful to interpret the results and include our insights from being on the ground for several implementations.

If you would like to DECREASE your total cost of ownership, the following tidbits of advice will help justify your Business Intelligence investments:

1. Increase adoption

Questions about current BI environment: Is the platform easy to use? Did you include business goals as a part of your technology selection, architecture roadmap and implementation? Were business users invested in data quality, and therefore, final results?

Suggestion to increase adoption: Create pseudo self-service reporting and analytics by developing a series of 3-5 template visualizations, with drill down capability on only 2-3 data attributes WITH the business. Make SURE your infrastructure has been architected to handle the new expectations.

2. Increase impact and value of decisions made

Questions about current BI environment: What do Business Intelligence applications accomplish at your company? Has it become ingrained into how business users monitor their own performance?

Suggestion to increase impact and value of decisions: Gather the business users to collaborate and gain consensus on definitions for key metric reporting. Identify the first line managers’ key business objectives (how they get paid), and what they need to drill down on.

Stay tuned for more information on optimizing capabilities, decreasing complexity, managing ad-hoc requests and accurately measuring TCO.

Business Intelligence as catalyst for Innovation

We recently had the pleasure of attending the CIOSynergy event at the iconic Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel in downtown Chicago. The Panelists offered insights as to how they spurred innovation at their individual companies. Key points ranged from “Have an expectation of something different every day,” to “Put the right people in the right jobs,” and “Just do something.” Then Howard Putnam (former CEO of Southwest Airlines and Braniff International Airways) provided color to the conversation with illustrative and inspiring stories of Southwest Airlines rise to the top. His leadership through Braniff’s Bankruptcy has been noted by Harvard in a case study rightly called “The Ethics in Bankruptcy.” The key take away for me revolved around starting with the “Why” you are doing something, then figure out the “How” and finally, the “What” because Purpose will create a cause and inspire. The hope here is to inspire Innovation.

Our natural inclination is to arrange the key concepts outlined by our panelists and headlining speaker into categories effecting Business Intelligence. It seems as though these evidentiary pieces of advice may be categorized by Howard’s Why, How and What. The Why is “Innovation.” One may argue Business Intelligence is the How. Aligning the How (or Business Intelligence), with Why (or Innovation), is paramount to success.

We have found People and Process to be the main crux of what differentiates successful Business Intelligence implementations from catastrophic cost centers. Greg Galuska (CIO of DSC Logistics) mentioned honing in on the right organizational and IT skills, while Sajed Khan (CTO of A. Eicoff & Company, division of Ogilvy) talked about boosting IT to a helpful status with the business, making end users happy and ultimately fostering their faith in IT. Kevin Larson (CIO of AAR Corporation) pointed out his airline status as a direct result of really listening to the business and seeing the requirements first-hand.

How are your Business Intelligence initiatives fostering innovation at your company?

For more information on this event: http://www.amiando.com/chicago.html;jsessionid=AF703807A1884C2C2B630885B4137B55.web03?page=477097