Business Intelligence systems integration and consolidation

Business Intelligence systems

According to different reports, today's companies use five or even more Business Intelligence systems at once. And knowing the number of solutions being currently accessible in the market, report findings do not seem overstated. In the age of ubiquitous computerization, some people used to think that the more "IT" they use, the better and modern they are. How wrong this idea can be, prove numerous examples. Lack of moderation in BI solutions implementing leads to overpowering the company IT system and, as a result, slows down the work instead of accelerating it.

As for most of business issues - if well planned - a single BI tool might be sufficient. That's the role of consolidation to ensure that all components work well together leading to faster and more accurate solving the problem. However, it's not as easy as it seems. If a single tool is supposed to work sufficiently, it cannot be the first solution accessible.

Even though there is a lot of different Business Intelligence platforms and tools, not all of them are worth considering. The question, then, is how to distinguish reliable from the ones that manager should avoid.

The role of planning Business Intelligence implementation

Every business guidebook begins with the words "think about what you want to do, then think how you want do reach that". Every business requires tightly specified goals. A manager needs to know which direction to drive the company in. If that is missing, decisions become accidental and it happens to be hardly possible to determine what can help. Before settling a company, think about goals. Before introducing a new direction to already existing firm, think about the goals you want to achieve. Today's Business Intelligence solutions supports their users on each and every stage of planning process to ensure a shorter path to reaching the goals.

The importance of precise and reasonable planning can be noticed on every stage of strategy executing process. If the plan is very well thought and free from logical mistakes, then it's realizing should be easy and trouble-free. Moreover, there no problems with its optimizing should be occurring.

Once the goals are known and described, it comes to preparing and executing the strategy. As for that, the idea of Business Intelligence consolidation is meaningful.

Business Intelligence consolidation in practice

What people often forget about is the fact that the less elements a system consists of, the less can fail. That's crucial in case of BI. Once there are many and differentiated tools and solutions, the thing is to choose only the most usable of them. However, if one decides to implement more than one system, making them work well together becomes important and - in most of cases - truly difficult.

Thereupon, the what more and more managers begin thinking about is consolidation. If the Business Intelligence system is consolidated, most of activities can be performed from within one interface. With no separate databases, complex querying nor plenty of collateral tasks. Thank to better consolidation, managers can focus on what they do instead of how to do it. And the IT departments also are the ones that benefit from consolidated systems. If deprived of a must for struggling with insufficient data compatibility, they can work faster and more efficiently.

The thing that needs to be understood is the fact that time spent on implementing BI system to let it work as efficiently as possible is crucial to future company's performance. Thereupon, one shouldn't hurry up once it hasn't leaded to anything wanted anytime before.