"We need to create an environment where that information can live safely," said Frank Buytendijk, a research vice president at Gartner Inc., at the company's BI conference in London recently. "There is unbelievable information to be mined." Organizations, however, must carefully plan how they will integrate their IT architectures for BI, said Bill Hostmann, Gartner research vice president. High user expectations and eventual commoditization of BI platforms will bring down the per-user cost, he said.

But the lack of ability among BI users to customize and share the information will hold back its effectiveness, he said. After deploying a BI system, CIOs have often said the main problem is that they forgot to train users, Hostmann said.

"It's the biggest hidden cost," Hostmann said.

Companies tend to revert to spreadsheets as information system "duct tape" as they move to a common platform. But spreadsheets "are not a tool to manage your business," said Andreas Bitterer, a research vice president at Gartner. Bitterer said he knows of a large company that uses 14,000 spreadsheets, a troubling fact when numbers on one spreadsheet affects many others.

The amount of attention paid to BI projects is crucial to their success or failure. "What we find is that the success of a business-intelligence initiative is proportional to the altitude of the executive that it reports to," Hostmann said.

Philips Electronics NV has undertaken a broad program over the last few years to revamp its performance management, financials reporting, marketing, IT and technology, said Jan Hommen, former vice chairman and chief financial officer of Philips, who gave a keynote speech. It has 40 BI projects nearly completed with SAP AG.

[Via InfoWorld: Top News]
Prashanth Rai
Tag(s):CIO, BI