| Bahar, You pose a great question that I often get. Let's take a look at the different ways companies transform data and information into knowledge to make better decisions. ERP systems were originally designed to manage and account for the flow of business transactions as efficiently and accurately as possible. As such, the view of data they gave was aimed at satisfying financial reporting requirements. These snapshots of data work very well to close a quarter or build a balance sheet, but do little to answer the question of why did the company perform at the level being reported. The introduction of SCM and CRM represented significant advances in allowing a more scientific approach to the analysis of data. Now often included in the application suites of ERP vendors, this type of functionality not only allows the user to gain a better understanding of past trends, but also predicts future outcomes based on historical performance. This is as far as many companies take their BI initiatives, confident that they have the information necessary to make knowledgeable decisions. What prompts companies adopt technology other than their enterprise applications to develop BI? Most often, they are looking to go beyond the scope and technical capabilities that an individual enterprise application has to offer. The views ERP, SCM or CRM applications take are limited to the business functions under their control. Often, they tell part, but not all, of the story of why a business process is performing at a particular level. Are sales disappointing because of pricing, a poorly executed marketing campaign, or an out of stock condition? Is the cost to serve specific customers dragging profitability down? Questions like these can only be answered by aggregating and analyzing data across multiple functions and applications, possibly existing outside of the company itself. A technology stack with strong analytic, integration and presentation capabilities is required to take this cross enterprise view of business performance. Very few individual enterprise applications can satisfy these demands. Delivering the components to implement a cross-enterprise BI strategy is a hotly contested market among technology vendors. Besides the traditional competitors such as SAS, Cognos, and Business Objects, companies like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft are serious about creating a foothold in this rapidly growing market. Increased competition bodes well for end-user companies, allowing them to leverage technology already in place. Finally, BI is core to any BPM initiative. It is only with a detailed and quantitative understanding of process performance that meaningful changes can be made in the way companies do business. I hope this is helpful. It really comes down to a decision by your company of whether it sees more value in optimizing the performance of a specific function rather than taking on the much more complicated task of raising process performance across the enterprise. |