Central Intelligence: Large organizations are moving to consolidated BI suites

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February 27, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Not many CIOs would rush to take on a business intelligence project like Jorge Basto's. As director of technology at the Georgia Administrative Office of the Courts, Basto is working to implement a statewide BI system for the approximately 1,000 state courts, most of which have different databases, case management applications and reporting tools.

"There is no state mandate on software, data elements, etc. So it's very difficult to integrate case information," he says. "Our first step is trying to find commonalities, like find a specific, unique identifier for an offender."

Nevertheless, Basto expects to have the state's first integrated BI application in place by the end of this year. The application, which will be called Judicial Intelligence, will be implemented with the Business Objects XI suite. It will use XML for tagging and storing data used by the court's case management applications. XML will also be used for parsing document content. The Business Objects SA software will give Georgia's judiciary a single reporting, query and analysis tool layered over existing applications.

Basto says he believes the benefits of consolidating court reporting and analysis applications will be substantial: "There are seven levels of courts, numerous court-related agencies and offices, as well as several executive and legislative agencies that could use this information."

For example, with BI, court administrators could more easily spot problems. "They could pull statewide case-load statistics, for instance, and analyze them in order to make a case for adding more judges," Basto says.

But trying to impose a single reporting, querying and analysis tool on any heterogeneous, geographically dispersed organization is likely to be difficult. So it's no big surprise that few enterprises currently have a single BI system. One of the downsides of moving from individual tools to consolidated BI is that not all users want to use a new application.

"In general, standardizing on a single BI platform is a good idea," says Kurt Schlegel, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. "However, few organizations have actually done it. Most are hampered by the political realities of replacing a tool from existing projects, all in the name of standardization."

According to surveys conducted by Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., most large organizations have between five and 15 different reporting and analysis tools. So consolidating means "taking away those technologies that users feel are most appropriate for their tasks," says Keith Gile, an analyst at Forrester.

Combining Functions

Consolidated BI products combine functionalities such as online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, standardized reports, custom report generation, end-user querying, visual analysis tools, and executive dashboards and scorecard functions, which are used for tracking key performance metrics. BI may also include extract, transform and load tools for moving data into a data warehouse, and integration adapters for connecting directly to an application or database. Generally, though, BI offerings fall into one of two distinct categories: data mining/analysis or business reporting.

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