Graham Dewar - Enterprise Performance Management Practice Lead

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions can be very valuable for business users, but they can also be hard and expensive to implement. So if someone offers to provide your BI solution in return for a modest monthly fee, why would your answer be anything other than a resounding “Yes”?

A ‘BI in the cloud’ solution could provide on-line access to configurable dashboards and reports hosted by a 3rd party for a modest monthly per-user fee, although you’ll need to get past the ‘4 Buts’ first…

Mention ‘BI in the cloud’ to your analysts and they’ll fire back but#1: “But how can a generic BI platform meet our specific enterprise wide requirements”. Good question, it can’t in all places, but it will meet some BI needs that compliment a wider solution, and will do this quickly and accessibly. So pick discrete areas to pilot first, and build from there.

They team won’t be shy about sharing but#2 either: “But our data is in such a mess it might not support decent BI”. Good point. To use BI in the cloud you need a grip on your data and how to analyse it. Making an existing mess more transparent may be a call to arms to increase data quality, but it won’t fix the problem. So, tidy up your data first.

The Risk Officer will readily share but #3: “But we can’t possibly trust a 3rd party to protect our sensitive and valuable BI data and make it reliably available”. Of course that may be true, but equally a 3rd party may provide dedicated servers and robust security to mitigate this. So, do a security audit and choose a trusted provider.

You’ll also need to address but#4, from the CIO: “But how do we integrate a cloud BI solution with the range of systems we have”. Fair point, but popular systems should integrate fairly easily. For other systems the problem isn’t unique to the cloud – they’d be equally hard to integrate with an internal BI solution. So, provide BI for the easier systems first, then build from there once the value is proved.

Once you’ve successfully navigated the ‘4 Buts’ it may be time to consider BI in the cloud.

We offer a range of BI solutions, and are the first provider of SAPs Business User Cloud solutions, providing secure environments, governance and migration approaches for our clients.

At Atos Consulting, Business Intelligence is part of our Added Value focus.

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