Business Intelligence System, Essay Example

Introduction

Business Intelligence systems will offer the business a number of significant benefits (i) The ability for the firm to access data in a common or standard format from multiple sources (ii) a measurement tool that will enable us to see who our good and bad customers are. This in turn will enable us to improve our customer relationships and fine tune our marketing strategy. There are two distinct types of business intelligence that we need to explore further: (i) Traditional – the reporting and analyzing of data by means of statistics and graphs. Whilst this is useful it has its limitations (ii) Operational – this is the examination operational data in order to facilitate business change. This uses real time data and provides the most optimum returns in decision making.

Business intelligence solutions

There are a number of leading Business Intelligence solutions providers on the market. The following is a brief synopsis of the leading service providers:-

Ibm:  IBM  has partnered with the software provider of COGNOS in order to provide a seamless integrated solution. An open architecture solution designed to provide the following information:  Reporting, Analysis,  Score-carding, Dashboards, and Integrated mobile communications.  The system integrates to other Enterprise Resource Planning platforms such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. (IBM)

Sap:  SAP is renowned for its excellence in Business Intelligence and Enterprise Report planning software.  There are some serious historical drawbacks here.  The software implementation is extremely complex, it is expensive, resource intensive and the SAP kills are in extremely high demand and as such it is hard to retain skilled practitioners unless you can meet their high expectations in terms of salary and benefits. “With these powerful solutions, users throughout your enterprise can access, format, analyze, navigate, and share information across the organization. SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence solutions”. (SAP).

Oracle:  Established itself as one of the leading Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) despite huge competition in this arena. It has established itself as a world market leader and is the preferred vendor of choice for most large Corporations.  Business Intelligence was a logical progression for this firm “Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g delivers contextual, relevant and actionable insight to everyone in an organization, resulting in improved decision-making, better-informed actions, and more efficient business processes.” (Oracle Corporation)

Panorama:  A fairly good solution for those that are linked into Microsoft software solutions as they have made the platform integrated to Microsoft software “For the last 14 years, Panorama has been a strategic Microsoft partner and continually adds innovation on top of the Microsoft platform.” (Panorama). The Panorama product called Nova View® similarly provides analytics, reporting, dashboards, scorecards working on top of any data source.

Recommendations

Ultimately it becomes a matter of choice and vendor preference.  My preference would be for the adoption of the ORACLE solution for the following reasons:

• Well established with international reputation of reliability
• A well-established market place of skilled Oracle BI practitioners
• Integrates well to all Oracle RDBMS solutions
• Easier implementation path creating cost reductions and earlier return on investment
• A great support and maintenance program and business product enhancement by an established R&D Program for their product.
• Offices in all of our geographical locations

Works Cited

IBM. IBM Business Intelligence. 2010. 6 9 2010 <http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/solutions/data/>.

Oracle Corporation. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g. 2010. 8 9 2010 <http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/enterprise-edition-066546.html>.

Panorama. Next Generation PI. 2010. 8 9 2010 <http://www.panorama.com/>.

Sap. Business Intelligence Solutions. 2010. 8 9 2010 <http://www.sap.com/uk/campaign/2010_04_Cross_business_intelligence_rc/index.epx?URL_ID=CRM-GB10-RDC-BBAB&campaigncode=CRM-GB10-RDC-BBAB&source=gawukmds01&dna=85761,8,0,100047271,764120283,1283991312,sap+business+intelligence,21920960,5873541889>.