Executive Overview
The business world is moving faster and growing more complex. Competition grows more
fierce; customers more fickle. Product lines have multiplied, with shorter life cycles. Operations
are geographically dispersed or outsourced altogether. M&A activity has accelerated. Regulations
are more stringent, and compliance reporting – with corresponding audit trails – more
cumbersome.
The supporting technology landscape is consequently more complicated. ERP systems have
become the operational backbone of most organizations, with a myriad of custom, customized
and internally developed add-on applications for specific functions. Suppliers’ systems often
feed directly into internal systems, and customers want open access as well.
Information is expected on-demand to match the speed of business. But that information is often
disintegrated and hidden – locked within different data sources, conflicting reporting structures,
departmental spreadsheets – clouding the true picture of operational and financial situations.
These gaps create operational inefficiencies and increased overhead. As important, they have
their own opportunity cost – obscuring the insights that can spark a new product to meet a market
gap, retain customers’ loyalty or create a more efficient supply chain.
Business Intelligence (BI) applications were created specifically to break through the clutter of
data and give business managers actionable information, which ushered in a host of both
internally-developed and packaged solutions more than a decade ago. As in most other
application categories, the make vs. buy debate tipped in favor of packaged solutions for a
majority of companies.
BI has now moved up to being the number one solution priority in supporting and delivering on
nine of the top 10 business opportunities, according to Gartner:1