(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — When Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City built a data warehouse serving as the single information resource point for the organization, integrating data from 20 different sources, the largest health insurance provider in the Kansas City area saw improvements in members’ health and was able to streamline internal processes.
This is just one examples of how organizations are using business intelligence solutions to capture, analyze, warehouse and mine customer information to make more informed business decisions. Without taking a hard and perhaps difficult look at their data using BI, many companies are losing out on opportunities and business advantages. And given this highly sought after service, service providers may regret not committing to BI as an important part of their Software as a Service portfolio.
SaaS-based BI tools can be cheaper, and easier to deploy and use than on-premise BI products. And as traditionally on-premise enterprise software applications such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain management have gone off-premise, it follows that BI would follow suit.
While there has been speculation over the past few years that BI would become pervasive throughout the enterprise, allowing anyone with computer access to do analytics, current data management practices are holding companies back from deploying advanced analytics tools. A recent survey on BI conducted by HP found that data quality, data governance and master data management are top priorities for companies; specifically, they realize that making BI truly pervasive requires getting the data right.
There are signs, however, that companies are increasingly able to take their data into their own hands. Power-users of Microsoft Excel, for instance, have been using what BI blogger Maloy Manna calls “self-service BI.” The key, however, is finding a middle ground between micro-management and irresponsibility, which is a formula on which many providers are still working.
None of the major BI platform vendors has a significant presence or BI as a service offering in the market, nor are they expected to in the near future, according to Gartner analyst Bill Hostmann (download his report in PDF). The one notable exception is the SAP “On Demand” products. In February, SAP launched a new BI offering for casual users that it claims will tie together all of its SaaS BI products into one offering based on technology from Business Objects, which SAP acquired in 2007. Notwithstanding, the market remains far from saturated.
Hostmann notes that some BI service offerings (from generic BI platform capabilities to application-specific ones) are more mature than others. Also, business requirements do not always fit neatly into a predefined BI as a service offering. And finally, the out-of-the-box actionable-intelligence, promised by the BI vendors, must be weighed against human analysis and expertise.
Truly pervasive BI has the promise of delivering relevant insight across the enterprise and beyond. And while the technology is not yet perfected, and companies remain concerned about the effort they have to put into developing data management practices (as well as risking their data with a third party), there is an opportunity to provide a much needed service. By working with companies and helping them understand their data and the work that is involved, service providers can help them make better decisions.
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