What can business intelligence (BI) do for your organization?

As never before, business intelligence the finance function is integral to the success of your enterprise. Business intelligence should A successful BI solution can ignite the power of your organization, through finance. It will support your processes and best practices and empower employees to ignite the power of the entire organization with a single repository of financial truth, especially financial truth. The right BI solution will provide a financially accurate core of information and the ability to expose it across your enterprise. This will enable you to make well-informed business decisions that will have the best impact on your organization. What should I look for in a business intelligence solution? The ideal BI solution should, in a single integrated application, support the diverse needs of your finance organization including planning, reporting, monitoring, modeling and analysis. It should provide a financially accurate core of information and the ability to expose it to all employees, from finance to sales to operations and beyond. Your BI application should support the challenges of complex financial processes and the increasing compliance demands of tighter timelines, firmer controls and higher degrees of accuracy, while providing a single repository of financial truth enterprise-wide. The right BI application will enable you to turn volumes of data into meaningful information that will lead to more strategic business decisions and impact the way you run your business. What pain points will the right business intelligence application solve for my organization? It might be easy for McDonalds to create a hamburger that tastes the same no matter what country it is served in, but it is not easy for a global enterprise to apply the same business rules, accounting principles and financial reporting practices to operations in different countries. To paint an accurate financial picture, global enterprises have to put in place systems that compile financial date from geographically dispersed divisions using a myriad of technological applications and a variety of accounting practices, business rules and cultural expectations. The right BI application should provide your organization with:

Integration and Financial Accuracy It is key to find a single, integrated application that will provide your organization with one central repository for enterprise-wide financial and non-financial data. This single application and information repository should result in enterprise-wide financial integrity, elimination of redundancy, consistent application of business rules and a firm knowledge that business decisions are being made from a basis of financial truth. Fast and Accurate Reporting Fast and accurate reporting will give you and your executives more time to analyze data. A more thoughtful analysis of the bottom line allows you to monitor results against set objectives and develop more meaningful, long-term strategic plans that are actionable and trackable. It also enables you to peer into the depths of your complex organization and gain an insightful view of its financial reality. The SEC is demanding that corporations have this insight, and it is also critical for your organizations financial health. Your BI application should provide a single repository of accurate information that can easily accessed by decision-makers. How should I evaluate a business intelligence solution for my organization? There are a couple of key areas to consider when looking for a BI solution. Single Integrated Application When reviewing BI solutions it is key to find one that delivers a single, integrated application which provides one central repository for , enterprise-wide financial and non-financial data. The solution should be easily managed and provide a single point of maintenance regardless of the number of users or global geographic span of the user community. Depth of Functionality The ideal BI solution should provide superior functionality with outstanding performance and scalability. It should be able to perform complex business models unique to your organization. Organizational modeling should tap the potential of "what-if" analysis, allowing you to project the potential impact of different strategic decisions. Superior Reporting Capabilities Your BI should provide comprehensive reporting capabilities. You should be able to drill into any aspect of your organization, using powerful reports, charts and graphs for analysis. Report presentation should be flexible and easily updated or changed; it should be able to communicate your organizations complex information quickly and intuitively.

What questions should I ask business intelligence vendors when reviewing their solutions? There are a number of questions you should ask BI vendors when evaluating their CPM applications: Will this application adapt to proven business processes or will implementation require the wholesale change of business practices? Does the application deliver information to the desktop and minimize end-user response? Does the application provide maximum availability and accessibility to all network users? How many users can access a single platform? Will the application operate on one central server and one central database for all users? Will multiple application servers be required for users beyond particular geographical borders? Does the application import data from disparate technologies and software and consolidate information according to consistent business rules? Will the software run on a variety of industrystandard platforms without having to implement and support multiple versions? What IT staff resources are required to monitor, administer and otherwise support the system? Beyond manuals, online help and classroom training, is interactive e-learning available? To what extent can it be integrated with application processes as new business rules are developed?

How many users should I expect my business intelligence application to support? Your BI application should be highly scalable from tens to thousands of users. It should consistently provide best-inclass performance and scalability in benchmark tests. Your BI application should be proven to support thousands of geographically dispersed concurrent users with no degradation in performance. Will a business intelligence application work within my organizations IT infrastructure? A BI application should perform over disparate technologies, reside on one central server and database, and consolidate reports according to consistent business rules. It should be fully scalable, operate on industry-standard platforms and offer users high-speed, dynamic Windows and Web access to the central server and database. You should be able to role the application out across your enterprise with minimal or no hardware upgrades. How should I budget for a business intelligence solution?

It is key to find a BI solution that will enable you to effectively expose your financially accurate core of information across your entire organization. Look for solutions that license their application by function, not by number of users or hardware platform. When there is no restriction on number of users it will enable you to more easily provide all of your users with the same depth of functionality and access to information.