Article
A “Top Pick” for Your Business Intelligence Vendor "Short List"
—by Brian Jeffery, Managing Director – International Technology Group, info-itg@pacbell.net, (650) 949-8410
One of the key things we have seen over the years is that most of the industry’s business intelligence tools are designed by major business intelligence vendors (collectively, “Big BI”) for Fortune 500 users. The way they are designed and priced reflects that. By the time you have added in the cost of back-end data migration, implementation and training, the tab even in a small organization routinely runs to six figures.
You have to distinguish between two sets of challenges: the complexity of data sources, and the complexity of analysis. Even a small organization may have dozens of different, more or less incompatible data sources. But the information that is needed is often more basic, and the analysis tasks simpler than you find in large companies. Although SMBs might find it useful to have a “big” business intelligence vendor with high-powered analytical tools, they will get significantly higher returns from providing individual users with the subsets of data they need to do their jobs more effectively.
Part of the problem is that high-end tools are designed for analysis jobs of a size and complexity which are overkill for most SMBs, and they tend to be geared to the needs of specialists rather than generalists. In an SMB environment, the choice often boils down to: are you going to provide 100 people with useful data for, say $50,000, or just three people with “rocket science” data for $150,000? Nine times out of ten, the largest benefits for the business are going to be from getting data to the 100.
There are too many people in this business selling Cadillac solutions for Ford problems, and there are too many SMBs who buy that because they don’t understand that there are alternatives. That “Big BI” solution may have helped a $20 billion company to figure out the best way of managing its global toothpaste brands, but the decisions you’re dealing with are a lot closer to home. And your whole IT budget wouldn’t even pay for their ETL tools.
We were involved in one very typical project where the users were literally crying out for data. Hundreds of people needed information that was locked up in a bunch of incompatible data structures. The data was pretty basic stuff, and they needed it for the kind of everyday decisions that can make or break an organization. We looked at a number of different solutions, from data warehouses to low-end query and reporting tools.
Decision Technology came out way ahead of the rest of the field in our cost-benefit analysis. So the conclusion was that the client would get more useful information to more people, more rapidly with Decision Technology than with any of the other approaches. The alternatives would have forced us to go back to the users and say, “look, if you wait for a year or two while we set up a state-of-the-art BI system, put in a truckload of middleware, and drain your IT budget, we’ll get great information to your CEO twice a year.”
My advice to anyone looking for a business intelligence vendor would be: talk to your end users first. Find out what kind of information they really need, when they need it, in what form, and what benefit its going to bring to them. Then look at where the information is, and figure out what’s the fastest and most cost effective way to get it to them. In our experience, if you do that, there’s a good chance you’re going to find Decision Technology on your short list.
Decision Technology is to the BI business what Southwest Airlines is to air travel. No frills, but they’ll get you where you want to go fast and cheap.
The International Technology Group
The International Technology Group (ITG), established in 1983, is an independent research and management consulting firm specializing in information technology (IT) investment strategy, cost/benefit metrics, infrastructure studies, deployment tactics, business alignment and financial analysis.