Example Business Report: Butler Group

Key Findings

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? The era of the isolated Business Intelligence (BI) tool is drawing to a close. Certainly, most of the latest product releases from the industry's leading players have been targeted towards the delivery of enterprise BI services, and much of the recent consolidation activity can be attributed to a movement towards an 'all-in-one' strategy for BI. All organisations need to become more efficient in the way that they exploit their data assets. In the BI arena data has no intrinsic value unless it can be used to support business decisions. It is Butler Group's opinion that business will only be able to improve its information services, and obtain real value from the ever-increasing data silos that it continues to generate, when it accepts that there are significant advantages to be gained from integrating and standardising its approach to the management of BI services. Visible cost savings that come from BI product consolidation will accrue from the simplification of systems management and systems support infrastructures. At the same time Butler Group believes that the real financial benefits to the organisations will come from the better, more consistent, and more competitive use that the business can make of integrated operational intelligence. BI has reached a crossroads, and its value to business will only be improved when products are delivered that are capable of being used as genuine enterprise-wide, intelligence-lead, data access, management, and information delivery solutions. Any organisation that cannot deal with data quality and consistency issues from within the confines of its BI platform does not have a credible product in place, nor does it have a plausible BI strategy. Ultimately there needs to be a high priority set on BI to take first-line responsibility for all the data that it services. Accepting poor and unproven data into enterprise decision-making systems is in Butler Group's opinion the ultimate recipe for disaster.

Within an organisation's enterprise BI strategy, Butler Group recommends that each existing BI deployment should be carefully reviewed, to ascertain whether it should be replaced, integrated into another platform solution, or removed due to duplication or redundancy.

Introduction

Both public and private sector organisations have become highly proficient at capturing large volumes of data, with the capability to hold information about every customer that has ever transacted business with them, or every citizen that resides within their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, for many such organisations the good news ends there: although they have been working diligently at taking in information and building up terabytes of stored data across a variety of operational systems and databases, the one vital thing that they have failed to improve upon is the ability to make more effective use of that data. Let us not mince words here: without exception, all organisations need to become more efficient in the way that they exploit their data assets. Furthermore, the data control and management issues that are being discussed here will not be resolved by simply attacking them with technology solutions that slice and dice the data into manageably segmented chunks before delivering it to sales and marketing functions as customer intelligence. The problems associated with the way that we utilise our corporate data are far more deep-seated than that, and the resolutions that need to be applied are far more fundamental than can be achieved by simply throwing in more intelligence-lead technology.

For Butler Group the easy way out would be to accept that the latest BI technology releases provide all the answers, and that we can all sleep safely in our beds at night knowing that when customer or operational performance metrics change we will be properly informed. After all, the BI solutions that we all use are in the main extremely mature, the results that can be achieved from deploying and using the technology are well understood, and the range of products and tools that are available are extensive. However, our view is that over the last two years BI usage has stagnated. The vendors have failed to address key user requirements, focusing instead on bringing new technology on stream, acquiring and integrating complementary products, and building end-to-end BI-based intelligence suites. But, whilst doing all of this, they have fundamentally failed to understand the way that business organisations are utilising their products, and it is this basic failure that is holding back organisations from working smarter with the data assets that they hold.

It is Butler Group's contention that BI has reached a crossroads. Without doubt there are a number of genuinely strong BI solutions available today, but while they continue to be deployed at a limited tactical level, the value proposition that the technology is capable of delivering will remain constrained. Three years ago the BI industry was attempting to play on the business need for Integrated Business Intelligence (IBI). In our opinion that approach failed, and nothing much has changed. Today we have a situation where businesses are strongly inclined - perhaps we may even go as far as to say that they are desperate - to find a better, more efficient, and more cost-effective approach to utilising the competitive and commercial value of their data assets. The BI industry itself is eager to provide its services at a cross-organisation level through the deployment of strategic and enterprise-pervasive BI, but the business community seems somewhat reluctant to acquiesce. A stalemate appears to exist; on the one hand both business users and the industry itself need to improve the way that BI products and services are used, but if we are to move beyond departmentalised tactical deployments of BI, we must

understand the critical steps that will be involved in optimising the technology for the benefit of the enterprise. Therefore, on

behalf of business users everywhere, there is a need to clearly spell out the incremental value proposition that the extended enterprise use of BI can provide.

Business Issues

Since the millennium, business has spent too much of its IT budget on the purchase of ineffective data interrogation tools. On the other side of the equation the ability of such tools to deliver consistent, enterprise-level information has been restricted by the tactical and localised nature of such deployments. It is fair to say that most organisations continue to sanction BI investments on a case-by-case basis, typically at a departmental level. The result is BI sprawl; many disparate systems digging away at independently gathered subsets of often common corporate data. Not only is this an unnecessary and inefficient waste of IT resources, but more importantly it creates problems in terms of establishing a common version of the truth. It is Butler Group's opinion that business will only be able to improve its information services, and obtain real value from the ever-increasing data silos that it continues to generate, when it accepts that there are significant advantages to be gained from integrating and standardising its approach to the management of BI services.

In the BI market, standardisation is the process of consolidating an organisation's range of disconnected BI tools on to a

single, or at least a reduced, BI platform foundation. Vast reserves of energy and indeed budget have already been spent by BI vendors on preparing their systems and architectures to deliver on such a vision. They believe that the time is right in terms of market need, and in their own ability to put forward a solid and financially proficient business case.

Operationally, business will benefit from the enterprise capabilities of BI by consolidating their requirements down to the systems resources of a selected vendor. Functionally, organisations would benefit by easing the complexity that comes from supporting and administrating multiple BI systems; they would also benefit from having a common strategy for data access and managing a single set of data structures. Further advantages would also be gained from the reporting side where a common range of reporting structures could be used to deliver universally consistent information for all enterprise users. Key cost saving benefits will also accrue from the consolidation of an organisation's BI strategy. Essentially these will come from economies of scale - simplified management, simplified maintenance, and from reductions in support and end-user training costs. But this tells only part of the story, because Butler Group believes that the real financial benefits to the

organisation will come from the better, more consistent, and more competitive use that the business can make of integrated operational intelligence - intelligence that can be delivered from a single source, and intelligence that at the same time can provide the capacity to support power users, line-of-business decision makers, and all types of information consumer. Technical Issues

The delivery of enterprise-level BI capabilities, and consequential product consolidation that results in a single vendor taking responsibility for all of an organisation's intelligence-based information management requirements, shows up how inefficiently BI services are being delivered today. It also identifies the fact that business has only scratched the surface of what BI technology can achieve. Part of the problem, and a significant reason why BI continues to be used in such a fragmented way, comes from the fact that individual user departments continue to be reluctant to give up on the solution-driven technology products that they currently use to support the delivery of their BI services.

At an enterprise level we believe that the key capabilities required to deliver end-to-end information management from a single platform infrastructure are data quality and Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) services; data storage and

management; metadata management; performance management (forecasting, budgeting, and planning); query and analysis; KPI management and dashboard creation; and enterprise-level reporting. Also, the usage and availability of enterprise BI servers from many leading BI vendors is becoming more common; the role of the BI server is to provide the necessary centralised management, security, and customer-facing performance that is required of enterprise BI.

In addition, the use of Web technologies to increase information availability, whilst simultaneously reducing the IT support load by encouraging self-service, is also becoming more commonplace. When built on a platform of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive data, Web-based BI facilities provide the opportunity to encourage users to take control of their own

information needs. This, in our opinion, can have a dramatic impact on the efficiency and efficacy with which information is used within businesses.

Finally, the availability of enterprise reporting facilities has to be seen as a cornerstone component of the extended enterprise BI model. It is the vehicle through which most information will be distributed. Again, in this important information delivery area, the Web comes into its own by providing the capabilities to address the needs of all information users, from power users to information consumers. At a more detailed level, comprehensive BI reporting services should include facilities to enable local power users and developers to create flexible report libraries for mass and targeted distribution. It should support self-service browsing - providing executive reports on a server via a Web interface with authorised users being able to filter, drill, change graphical options and data sources, and save content for future use and ongoing distribution.

Market Analysis

Traditionally BI has been employed in specific application areas; its service delivery model has at times become too reliant on skilled data analysts, and has been focused principally on the scrutiny of historic information. Until recently, BI tools have

mirrored these patterns of usage, and despite protestations from the vendor community that they have enterprise capabilities, have delivered little in the way of interoperability or integration with other types of application.

The outcome has been that many business organisations have made project-based investments in individual BI tools and solutions, often from diverse vendors with consequent duplication of licence and maintenance costs, and with the resultant

need to maintain multiple skill sets. The problem is further exacerbated in larger and enterprise-level organisations, where similar business issues, across different divisions, still exist, and are also being addressed by a disparate range of

disconnected solutions. The BI market is now at a crossroads in its development lifecycle. In Butler Group';s opinion the next two years will be crucial to its future wellbeing. This is because, in the past, BI has been perceived as a specialist function for power users and the technology savvy, and as a result insufficient attention has been paid to the concept of BI as having a strategic business role to play.

Fundamentally, we are of the opinion that the era of the isolated BI tool is drawing to an end. Certainly, most of the latest product releases from the industry's leading players have been targeted towards the delivery of enterprise BI services, and much of the recent consolidation activity can be attributed to a movement towards an 'all-in-one' strategy for BI. Perhaps business organisations are only just starting to seriously consider the information delivery challenges that lay ahead, but, as they look for new ways to rationalise their IT investments, the cost saving benefits that can be obtained from standardising on a single BI platform will become increasingly attractive.

In this respect many technology experts are already questioning why organisations need different tools and environments to do special types of querying and reporting. Therefore, as business awareness grows of the benefits that can be achieved through the deployment of enterprise BI technology, customers will demand tools that can deliver cost-effective information services, whilst still scaling across the enterprise as a whole. As a result we would expect to see the balance of power shifting in the BI arena. The number of pure-play vendors will be drastically reduced, and will consolidate around leading, functionally strong players such as Actuate, Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Information Builders, Microstrategy, SAS and SPSS; with the main challenges coming from enterprise software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP - companies that are providing BI capabilities as part of their application software platforms. These vendors will seek to offer low cost BI and analytics from within their application modules, which in the short- to medium-term at least, will make the enterprise BI market extremely competitive.

Summary

The era in which the isolated use of multiple BI tools can be relied upon to support the information needs of business is rapidly drawing to a close. The future value of BI to business organisations will come from the extended use of enterprise intelligence services that incorporate the use of products with the capacity and capability to be used as genuine, enterprise-wide, intelligence-lead, data access, management, and information delivery solutions.

Resulting from this, Butler Group believes that business decision-makers should be challenging their technology suppliers to deliver intelligence-lead solutions that can deliver pervasive BI facilities that empower information users at all levels within the organisation to work smarter and in a manner that makes the organisation more efficient, more agile, and ultimately more operationally competitive.