Moving Your BI Program Forward
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
In an ideal world, your business has a comprehensive, fully integrated Business Intelligence (BI) program complete with a best-practice governance model to help you successfully navigate today’s turbulent business environment – adapting to change, averting risk, exploiting new opportunities, and keeping execution in lockstep with strategy every day across all facets of your business.
More realistically, you probably have some isolated, dated BI reporting tools – some at the department level, some at the C-level – that you were pleased to get several years ago but might be looking kludgy by today’s standards. Maybe those tools are losing their usefulness – and the related competitive advantage you enjoyed for some period of time. Or maybe you’ve invested in more mature SAP BI solutions but now face the uncomfortable truth that your BI tools and latent BI potential remain underutilized and untapped.
In these scenarios – and all in between – you also probably have terabytes of valuable data sitting in siloed applications across your organization. You know you need to get more aggressive on the BI front, but you’re not sure where to start, or what your next step should be. You’re understandably hesitant to rush headlong into a potentially expensive BI initiative without an immediate goal and clear-cut endgame.
Still, the cold, hard facts cannot be denied. Escalating competition, shifting markets, demanding customers, shrinking margins and a turbulent economy make fence-sitting on the question of BI a dangerous and untenable position.
You need to move your BI program forward now. But how and at what price?
Controlled-scope, industry-specific dashboard projects provide a fast and affordable way for you to drive your BI program forward in a way that yields immediate value with low risk, while providing a solid foundation for a future, more comprehensive and integrated BI program.
SAP services partners with demonstrable industry experience, systems integration capabilities and SAP expertise (across the entire SAP BOBJ BI and SAP Business Suite stacks) are uniquely qualified to successfully lead controlled-scope, industry-specific dashboard projects that address immediate performance monitoring and decision-making needs.
By leveraging preconfigured templates and implementation accelerators fine-tuned over years of experience, and incorporating predefined, industry-specific dashboard views based on established best practices, these select SAP services partners can affordably build and implement a leading-edge SAP dashboard in as few as 12 weeks.
This combination of industry experience and SAP BOBJ BI proficiency is in large part why Gartner predicts that by 2014 40% of all BI spending will go to systems integration and service providers rather than software vendors.
But speed and affordability are not enough to cement the value of a dashboard project. Integration and scalability are equally vital. The last thing you need is another stand-alone ‘best-of-breed’ point solution cluttering your IT landscape and running up maintenance costs.
Dashboards built on the highly scalable SAP BusinessObjects Edge or SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform utilizing SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius Enterprise) and related Dashboard offerings – SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (personal & departmental editions), SAP Crystal Dashboard viewing option, SAP Crystal Presentation Design, etc. – provide the immediate benefit of connectivity across all SAP transactional and operational systems.
Encompassing all SAP and non-SAP applications, this integration capability enables the access, consolidation and visual dashboard display of the most important information needed for making timely, smart, strategic decisions.
For additional perspective on SAP BusinesObjects BI, check out the recording of Optimal’s first in a series of BI-focused webinars:
Enabling SAP BOBJ in Your Organization - Choosing the Right Tool for the Right Job >>
