How do you know your Business Intelligence was poorly integrated?

There are very obvious warning signs that the integration of a Business Intelligence system was unsuccessful. The integration should be smooth and pose little if any major issues. If managers are arguing about differing analysis results even when data came from the same source or if higher ups are uncomfortable signing off on financial statements.

Some other warning signs include decisions changed due to the discovery of data that was not obtained originally. Analysts alert management that potential problems are being discovered while running queries against the data in operational systems, and the analysts are unable to distinguish how long the problem has existed.

As a result of an out-of-stock condition for a crucial part, an organization must accelerate an order and buy the item at a superior price. Then once the order arrives, the company discovers that another area had a surplus of the very same part and had been trying to sell the part at a discounted price to balance its inventory.

Even more warning that there is a problem may be that while analysts use a variety of diverse Business Intelligence tools to produce reports from the organization’s application systems, they re-enter applicable summary principles into a spreadsheet for any analyses demanding data from more than one application. Also a problem may be present with a sequence of very persuasive charts and graphs; an executive demonstrates what seems to be a thorough analysis of the root of a specific issue.

A problem that is personally even more distressing, is that while the layout of the report meets all reporting requirements as if it were a work of art, the executive’s trustworthiness suffers to a great extent when someone says that the true meaning of the data was never touched upon and asks what data was used to form the report as if they have no idea what is being expressed.

Data Integration (Building Vs. Buying)

As a customary law, unless the data integration process is truly going to be a solitary endeavor, organizations are almost always somewhat duty bound to ardently take into account the benefits of a packaged data integration solution.

The interim preliminary costs related to an internal software design effort are even more probable to be lower than the procurement cost of a packaged product. Even so continual future upkeep costs and the secondary costs associated with incapacity to act in response quickly to alteration will just as rapidly exhaust the initial cost savings.

In addition to the initial costs, the productivity resulting directly from the capability of most of the more popular commercial data integration packages to incorporate and distribute metadata with other data warehouse tools of the like is something that most internal solutions simply do not regard as possible or offer to make available.

Of unique many importance’s the competence to share metadata with modeling and blueprinting or design tools and the Business Intelligence tools that will access the data warehouse is particularly important. Commercial data integration packages are also more likely to be integrated to include data quality and data profiling tools, a practicality that is habitually overlooked by original, internal development efforts.

So in view of data integration tools to be had by a database vendor, it’s imperative to acknowledge that one of the chief strong points of a database vendor’s unique data integration product can also be one of its most significant draw backs.

Bear in mind vendors often heighten their solutions for populating their own databases. In truth, some offerings, with the likely exclusion of also producing flat files, can only populate a vendor’s own database. Therefore in conclusion it is prudent to assume that the choice between building and buying an integration solution relies heavily upon the needs and financial stability of the organization.

First Page: Business Intelligence Integration