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.