Enterprise Information Management: Credit Crunch BI

Economic downturn has caused many upheavals in the Corporate world. This also resulted in significant shift in Corporate priorities. As you all know one of the first items to be trimmed happens to be the IT Budget. This places tremendous pressure on the CIOs. Most of the IT Surveys done in 2009 show that BI, Server virtualisation, ERPs, Portals and EAI are the top priorities for CIOs, in the same order.

Everyone is aware that BI is a Competitive differentiator. We know that BI plays a bigger game, be it in marketing for cross / up selling opportunities, bring in collaboration through EPM / CPM Applications for Planning and Budgeting, MDM CDI for 360 degrees view on customers, dashboards for quick outlook on performance, ad hoc environment for self analysing capabilities etc., etc.

Most of the big companies have already invested in BI in a big way. It is quite evident that big companies thrive on multiple BI tools and technologies. Small companies have started plans to invest in BI in big way. Credit Crunch and economic downturn is causing heartburns for the CIOs who are interested in investing, but not having enough funds on hand. BI Programs being obviously high expenditure programs suffer the most.

Take heart that innovations are happening in BI space too. These new innovations let you play hard in the game, even though your hands are tied on expenditure. Some people call them as BI Mashups, others call them as BI Killer Tools. These have different flavours too. Some are most IT users oriented and others are business user oriented.

I don't want to talk about a new tool in the form of BI Mashups or BI Killer tools that are going to replace the existing BI / Reporting tools. Then what is this?

Consider this: More than 70% of the BI is involved in standard reports. Rest of the BI is spread across ad hoc reporting, analytics, OLAP, Dashboards etc. So, savings can be brought if there is a good answer to address the 70% of the problem.

In case of large organisations, where multiplicity of BI tools exist, there is always a need to bring the entire organisation under one umbrella of Enterprise Reporting. This can be achieved through different means. Either by standardising the reporting tool or by introducing a new thin umbrella on top of all these multiple reporting tools. Standardising the reporting tool will be a huge investment, instead the second seems more suitable. Tools like InfoFlow are making waves in this space. These tools provide single user interface for most of the standard report users. It can leverage the existing reports that are developed on different tools for its own reports. It can also schedule the existing reporting tools. This drastically reduces the need for expensive extra licenses for different reporting tools.

But for smaller organisations, where they have just embarked on BI programs, or contemplating for the same, it is definitely a good idea to put more power in the hands of business users. IT Team size will be small in these organisations. Reporting / BI Applications can be quickly developed by the business users themselves using tools like QlikView, Tibco Spotfire etc.

I can see a great future for both these types of tools in the market.