Marija Lysak, Smarten
In the past many large Business Intelligence (BI) projects have been too ambitious; starting with good intentions to provide an all-embracing information delivery solution but usually failing to address the business questions that need to be answered. The overwhelming majority of implementations have resulted in a combination of poor performance, frustrated users, and disappointment - and always at considerable expense. As a consequence, there has been a shift in recent years towards starting small with BI, with projects conceived within a business department or division and with the business taking ownership and responsibility for the success of the project. This approach is ideal for BI; it avoids the pitfalls of over-ambition and vague goals, and can deliver business benefits quickly.
New generation BI platforms have been designed with this very approach in mind, the technology can be rapidly put into service without the assistance of large infrastructure teams and with the useful side benefit of allowing IT personnel to focus on other critical tasks. Almost by definition, the approach of starting small with a few well-defined objectives results in early success and the scope of the objectives can then be expanded at a rate which the business can sustain.
This same approach makes it possible for small and medium companies, and departments and divisions within corporate organisations, to take advantage of BI solutions without exceeding their budget, or having to wait several months or years to obtain business critical information they need today. Avoiding lengthy implementation cycles of complex platforms means the real advantages of BI can be quickly embedded into business processes - dramatically improving short and long term business results.
It's true though that data cleansing and transformation effort will always be required in order to make all the disparate information within an organisation accessible and meaningful. To help with the transformation process, emerging BI solutions provide the end user with a visual, user friendly interface designed to enable many data cleansing and manipulation exercises to be performed within the product itself. Often this can be done by users themselves, with some assistance from the vendor's technical support team or through technical users within their own team, or their partnering organisations.
This capability delivers real value to
businesses, regardless of size or sector, eliminating the need for
complex, costly and time-consuming programming projects just to prepare
the data for analysis. It can also eliminate the need for unnecessary
substantial investment in IT infrastructure - so that the potential for
huge returns on investment through BI platforms can be realised sooner
rather than later.
This sounds good but how is it achieved?
Using
Software as a Service (SaaS) - it is the evolving mechanism of
delivering software applications to customers over the Internet - as a
service. Instead of installing and maintaining software on their own
desktops or servers, users simply access it via the web. The SaaS
provider manages the access to the application, including security,
availability and performance - freeing users from stressful, costly
software and hardware management.
In recent years, SaaS has flourished at an astounding pace because of the benefits it offers to all types and all sizes of business, and in addition to the cost advantage, the SaaS model offers numerous benefits over traditional licensed software approaches including no upfront costs, no hardware to purchase or install, no implantation, no testing of new configuration, no troubleshooting or maintenance costs, no costly or risky upgrades, little or no IT involvement and what's more you can try before you buy!
For more information please visit www.Smarten.com
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Post Date: October 1st, 2009