​Business Intelligence

From boardroom executives to frontline operation managers, the uncertain economy has highlighted the necessity—and the benefits—of making informed decisions. To cut costs, streamline operations, and fuel continual process improvements, employees must be empowered to make better decisions at every level in the organization. Critical business data needs to be accessible to all employees, so that they can perform their own analyses and freely share insights with team members. With access to relevant data, employees can find opportunities to operate more efficiently and grow revenues, so the company can emerge stronger from any economic environment.

The Business Intelligence challenge

If your organization is like most, you face three main challenges when it comes to implementing a Business Intelligence solution: staying within budget, meeting the needs of the business, and efficiently maintaining the solution going forward.

You might struggle to find a cost-effective BI solution and implement it within reasonable timeframes. Not only are many BI solutions expensive, they are resource-intensive because they require you to maintain multiple, non-integrated systems and tools. For a cost-effective solution that fits your budget, you need to work within the technology infrastructure you already have in place, minimizing start-up and implementation costs.

The second BI challenge organizations typically face revolves around meeting the needs of end users. BI solutions that can only be mastered by a few highly-trained users will not generate widespread insights or better decision making. It is important to choose a BI solution that supports the skill sets of the organization and that is easily accessible to all. BI solutions featuring familiar tools and interfaces will increase adoption rates while reducing training time and cost. Furthermore, to meet the needs of end users, a BI solution should deliver relevant information when users need it. Today’s conventional BI implementations rely on IT departments to develop reports for the end user. More often than not, the IT department becomes a bottleneck for the rest of the company. When IT professionals have to devote time to producing ad-hoc reports, they have less time to focus on important high-value projects.

The third BI challenge centers on maintaining and managing BI solutions once they are in place. Inflexible architecture and incompatible BI systems force users to create inefficient workarounds—compromising the system’s ability to deliver timely, accurate data. It should be easy for you to track how your data and reports are being used, so that you can move IT resources to areas of the highest need. In order for you to scale your BI solution to meet your ongoing performance needs, the solution should be flexible, letting you expand coverage or add capabilities. The most efficient and cost-effective solutions to maintain are those that allow for central management of enterprise-wide workloads, integrate within the existing IT environment, and adapt to changing business needs. 

 Find out how Microsft BI helps you address these challenges!