Standardizing your Business Intelligence Solution
Business Intelligence Standardization is Becoming an Industry Standard
Business intelligence and reporting standardization is happening now say analysts at Gartner and Forrester. Enterprises need to jump on board to harness this competitive opportunity while standardization is still relatively new. The factors driving standardization in business intelligence and reporting are core to every company – cutting costs, boosting revenue, and increasing profits. Without a standardized business intelligence solution, your company may have a single version of the truth in a department but multiple versions across the company. Each department may have found a business intelligence solution but each may have pursued it in different ways and with different vendors, resulting in different versions of the truth and increased costs due to numerous vendors, training sessions, and problems with consistency.
A Business Intelligence Standard Helps to Reduce Cost and Increase Value
A standardized business intelligence solution establishes a single version of the truth to drive performance and consistent decision-making. With standardized BI, you can increase your organization’s agility and responsiveness because you spend less time evaluating software and more time creating value. The solution is designed with an interface to meet varied user needs so that all users, not just the highly technical ones, can make use of BI. This means that considerable value is added in terms of easier deployment, maintenance, and training. With fewer products to use, learn, and integrate into the system, your organization benefits from greater business effectiveness and lower costs.
A Business Intelligence Competency Centre is the Key to Standardization
Implementing your business intelligence standard across the organization is difficult. The chosen BI solution must be able to scale to thousands of users, span countries and languages, leverage and support existing security, and link multiple data sources. And these are just the technical challenges. A business intelligence competency center combines the expertise of both business and IT users to implement a comprehensive BI solution that satisfies these requirements as well as those of the business users who are expected to rely on this solution on a daily basis. The competency center promotes the value of standardized business intelligence and encourages user adoption by communicating incremental successes to everyday users across the organization.
For more information on standardizing your BI, see the Choosing a Standard for BI and Reporting white paper from Cognos.
