Tame the BI Jungle

Computerworld - Many companies are eager to make sure data gathered from business intelligence tools gets into the right hands. Although the power user normally gets the benefit, the real value is in pushing BI data out to frontline workers for operational decision-making and up to executives for strategic adjustments in the direction of the business.

However, to successfully obtain the "one version of the truth" needed to exploit BI data for decisions that might affect daily operations, many companies find they must first eliminate multiple redundant BI tools and instead embrace a standard set of tools.

Five years ago, for example, Del Monte Foods Co. began an assessment of its BI and analytic tools to determine the company's strengths and weaknesses and develop an approach for enterprise BI. The San Francisco-based company found it had six different query and reporting tools, says Andy Wojewodka, Del Monte's director of business systems and decision support. "It was almost like whatever package that addressed transactional systems had a reporting tool bolted onto it," he says. "People were going off and developing their own reports. There wasn't any cohesiveness, and we ended up with numerous versions of the truth."

In late 2004, Del Monte decided to use Cognos Inc.'s Cognos Enterprise BI tools for business and production reporting and data analysis. In May, the company rolled out the first phase of its Cognos deployment to sales, marketing and finance users for a project to enable trade spending analysis. By the end of the year, the company will have 600 users on the system, Wojewodka says.

Del Monte has built a single Oracle enterprise data warehouse with information to support BI inquiries companywide. In addition, the company has layered Cognos analytics on top of the warehouse to provide interactive dashboards for executives.

"The business owner has a dashboard available where they can assess how they are trending and then can quickly link... with additional information to answer questions they may have so they can take action," Wojewodka says.

From Manual to Meaningful
Like many other companies, Cross Country Healthcare Inc. needed to standardize BI in order to bolster visibility and interpret data generated by different back-end transactional systems. Before standardizing on Business Objects SA's XI platform earlier this year, Cross Country was using tools from Cognos, Microsoft Corp. and other vendors to perform queries in silos based on the platform, says Kip Vann, CIO of the Boca Raton, Fla.-based medical staffing company.

"It took an act of Congress to get anything meaningful to the business, [and] every request required manual intervention with spreadsheets," he says. "We couldn't get a full view of the customer."