Part 3 of 3: Decreasing your 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:

5.      Manage process for business ad-hoc reporting requests

Questions about current BI environment: Do your business users deploy their own technology rather than going through the proper IT channels? As a result, do business users create their own metadata, degrading data quality?

Suggestion to manage ad-hoc reporting requests: Create a self-service architecture that allows IT to get out of the report writing business.

6.       Accurately measure total cost of ownership at beginning of implementation, and manage expectations.

Suggestion to accurately measure TCO: Look at both hard and soft costs of the initial implementation, support and maintenance. Include number of users, skill level (super user, part time user, etc.), complexity of data, size of data, cost of rolling out, time and effort for new additions, IT reputation and business sanity.