A "Top Pick" for Your Business Intelligence Vendor "Short List"

Business Intelligence Software Articles : A "Top Pick" for Your Business Intelligence Vendor "Short List" by Brian Jeffery

One of the key things we have seen over the years is that most of the industry's business intelligence tools are designed by major business intelligence vendors (collectively, "Big BI") for Fortune 500 users. The way they are designed and priced reflects that. By the time you have added in the cost of back-end data migration, implementation and training, the tab even in a small organization routinely runs to six figures.

You have to distinguish between two sets of challenges: the complexity of data sources, and the complexity of analysis. Even a small organization may have dozens of different, more or less incompatible data sources. But the information that is needed is often more basic, and the analysis tasks simpler than you find in large companies. Although SMBs might find it useful to have a "big" business intelligence vendor with high-powered analytical tools, they will get significantly higher returns from providing individual users with the subsets of data they need to do their jobs more effectively.

Part of the problem is that high-end tools are designed for analysis jobs of a size and complexity which are overkill for most SMBs, and they tend to be geared to the needs of specialists rather than generalists. In an SMB environment, the choice often boils down to: are you going to provide 100 people with useful data for, say $50,000, or just three people with "rocket science" data for $150,000? Nine times out of ten, the largest benefits for the business are going to be from getting data to the 100.

There are too many people in this business selling Cadillac solutions for Ford problems, and there are too many SMBs who buy that because they don't understand that there are alternatives. That "Big BI" solution may have helped a $20 billion company to figure out the best way of managing its global toothpaste brands, but the decisions you're dealing with are a lot closer to home. And your whole IT budget wouldn't even pay for their ETL tools.

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The International Technology Group (ITG), established in 1983, is an independent research and management consulting firm specializing in information technology (IT) investment strategy, cost/benefit metrics, infrastructure studies, deployment tactics, business alignment and financial analysis. info-itg@pacbell.net, (650) 949-8410.

This article is copyrighted by The International Technology Group (ITG). It may not be reproduced in whole or in part and may not be posted on other websites, without the express written permission of the author who may be contacted via email at info-itg@pacbell.net.

About Decision Technology, Inc. Decision Technology is a business intelligence vendor that is the ideal solution for organizations with limited IT resources, and whose data are confined in disparate databases or operational systems. Since 1985, Decision Technology has provided organizations with intuitive, information retrieval software for decision support applications. Its newest business intelligence software product, DecisionCentric, provides Enterprise Information Integration with query and reporting tools optimized for small and medium size organizations. It enables users to integrate, publish and analyze enterprise data across disparate data sources - without expensive ETL technology.

Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=153079