First annual survey of business intelligence systems*

Most organizations don't get the information they want from their existing systems. Some get their IT department or technical guru to write a report, which usually takes too long. Others create spreadsheets that let users do exactly what they want but at a very high price. Spreadsheets are inefficient and not completely reliable: errors can slip in through re-keying or calculation mistakes. There is no audit trail on changes and mistakes may not be detected. To make matters worse, spreadsheets are typically not shared across an organization and they are not updated as things change. So decisions are made with old data.

BI tools are supposed to take the mechanics out of the process. Analysts don't need to fiddle with the spreadsheet or wait until the IT department gets around to generating the required report. With BI, analysts can slice and dice the data any way they want without asking for help. Since all the BI information is stored on a central server rather than one user's desktop, BI tools should also provide one version of the truth.

The accompanying survey on CAmagazine.com includes responses from many of the leading BI systems -- Applix, BizTools, Cognos, Hummingbird, Hyperion, Informatica, Information Builders, OutlookSoft and Panorama Software. We asked a variety of questions about their cost, user base, target market and technology, as well as 70-odd questions related to BI functionality.

In the charts, you'll see a lot of the products do the basics. What makes them different? Cost and average number of users, among other things. BI vendors also vary in their offerings. Some offer budgeting, forecasting and consolidation in what is referred to as business or corporate or enterprise performance management. The need to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley has turned business performance management (BPM) into the technology du jour.

You also need to take a good look at the technology section. You can't go wrong if you just need support for Microsoft SQL Server, but you may find some of the products don't support other databases. The same applies to the operating system/network: Microsoft is a sure bet but the others may be a problem.

According to Donald MacTavish, director of product marketing for Hyperion, 70% of the market could be served by any of the tools out there. Don says you will see differences in BI tools if you're looking for sophisticated analysis such as linear or dimensional allocations, calculation libraries and statistical trending.

Some products are already integrated with the high-end ERP systems such as SAP or PeopleSoft – although the latter have their own BI tools. The surveyed products compete with SAP and PeopleSoft because large clients can have multiple ERP systems including SAP, PeopleSoft and others. It seems BI is not that well integrated with mid-market ERP and accounting systems. This will probably change as the BI vendors go after the middle market. Leading the charge will be Microsoft itself.

So far Microsoft has provided the platform for BI, including a data warehouse, extract, transform and load tools (ETL) and online analytical processing (OLAP) services (see below for an explanation of these terms). But it did not start to compete directly with the vendors in the survey until very recently. Microsoft now has a partnership with the developer of Targit BI, which is integrated with Navision. Targit BI is now called Business Analytics for Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision and is being promoted, sold and distributed through Microsoft.

There are a lot of technical terms that need to be understood in the BI world, which may in part explain why BI has not done that well in organizations without ample technical resources at their disposal. Let's start with ETL. The cost of extracting, transforming and loading data into a data warehouse can account for 50% of the total cost of a BI implementation. Data can originate from multiple sources and will probably need to be cleaned up for consistency and accuracy. Next the data is placed in "cubes" for analysis by an OLAP tool. It is possible to create these cubes with tools from BI vendors or from databases such as Microsoft SQL Server. With an OLAP cube, you can interactively slice and dice the data across multiple dimensions and drill down for more detail either in a spreadsheet or graphic view of the data. For more explanations of other terms, see the glossary.

BI offers accountants a big opportunity to help their organizations and clients better analyse their operations. Here's your chance to check it out.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE GLOSSARY Here are some of the terms used in the survey: API enabled (application programming interface) is a set of public (visible to other programs) function calls allowing communication between programs. Bubble-up exceptions let you know there are exceptions or variances when looking at a data summary. For example, you would know that sales to certain customers are below forecast when looking at total sales for a region. You could then drill down to see which customers are below forecast. Dashboard gives you a quick overview of how your business is doing based on some key figures using meters, dials, traffic lights, etc. Metadata gives analysts the ability to better understand data – its business context, source and description. One trend today is to define standards for metadata such as the open information model (OIM) developed by Microsoft and adopted by the independent Meta Data Coalition. (www.mdcinfo.com). Scorecarding helps companies communicate goals, establish key performance metrics and measure performance. Write back allows users to update an OLAP cube. This might be useful when providing comments on a particular view of the data. XML (eXtensible markup language): just as HTML has tags to define format, XML has tags to define data. XML will have a profound impact on sharing data in the future.