Delivering Business Value
BI tools are commonly used to streamline the process of creating management reports. Although reducing the time and expense of creating reports and lowering TCO is important, using BI to increase revenue, lower cost, preserve cash, and better acquire, keep, and grow the customer base is where the real value of these tools lies. Today packaged analytics applications provide prebuilt business metrics, dashboards and reports, and integrations based on industry best practices.

Making BI Pervasive
Numerous studies have shown that in most organizations, BI penetration of the potential community of users is less than 20 percent. The challenge for IT is to provide innovative ways to make BI easy, accessible, and actionable for end users. Advances in BI technology that are helping to increase user adoption include advanced visualization and integration with search engines, as well as embedding BI in applications and business processes.

BI Tool Consolidation
In many large organizations, BI tools have proliferated in a decentralized, departmental fashion. This often results in information silos that inhibit organizational alignment, yield inconsistent information, and drive up total cost of ownership. By consolidating on common BI technology standards, organizations can reduce the costs of training, system maintenance, redundant software license and maintenance agreements, hardware redundancy, and other variables that impact TCO. You can also centralize business rules, metrics, definitions, and user-access privileges so information is more accurate, consistent, and secure.

A successful BI implementation can deliver increasing levels of value. Most organizations begin by using BI tools to make enterprise reporting and analysis more efficient by reducing the time and expense required to deliver critical information. BI can deliver even more value when it is used to make the organization more effective through better business processes and better alignment of business goals and plans. The greatest level of value comes when BI initiatives drive business transformation by helping identify new customer segments, new markets, and new business models.