BI, though, has typically been very IT-centric, a specialized tool in the hands of dedicated analysts and walled off from other users, the real decision makers. While a powerful, high impact tool, BI has also proven to be costly, complex and largely inaccessible.

Business Intelligence

Getting Business Intelligence Out of the Ivory Tower.

Technology, though, is the great democratizer, and information not only wants to be free, it wants to find its way to those individuals who need it most. That’s what’s happening with new BI offerings delivered on demand via SaaS.  Cloud BI provides access to the millions of workers in non-IT lines if business—sales, marketing, HR, fulfillment—that typically have had to rely on spreadsheets and other unstructured data sources to accomplish such everyday tasks as making sales forecasts, planning for resource utilization or servicing customer accounts. Cloud BI provides browser-based access to sophisticated but easy-to-use data mining and reporting tools and leads to uncovering the "geniuses" of decision making hidden in every department.

Like all SaaS applications, Cloud BI is far less expensive than its traditional forerunner, deploys in a fraction of the time, doesn’t require capital investments in hardware or maintenance of an on-site data warehouse, and unburdens IT of support requirements. Most important, cloud BI, with it’s streamlined architecture and near-zero infrastructure requirements, is deployed outside the IT firewall, enabling users to share data and insights, integrate data from other ERP applications and combine data from corporate databases in different parts of the world, from other internal business units, and also from suppliers and partners in the company's extended value chain.

Browser-based interfaces are inherently more user-friendly and intuitive, creating the potential for BI to be easier for the non-IT professional to employ to mine data, document and share analysis processes and present findings. Expect cloud BI to morph from the language and structure preferred by the dedicated IT analyst into terminology and formats native to the business analyst, presented in the context of decision making.

SaaS applications already deployed in core areas, such as HR, CRM and SCM usually have some basic analysis and reporting tools, which serves to introduce line of business managers to the power of BI. Analytic applications embedded in cloud BI, however, provide much deeper statistical analysis and a more comprehensive set of reporting formats. For example, SaaS HR systems are ideal for maintaining employee pay records, managing staffing and recruiting, and monitoring employee travel and expense. Then, cloud BI in the hands of HR analysts can analyze the vast pool of information derived from these activities, identify trends in the data, and understand the real messages behind the numbers.

Cloud BI doesn’t replace the need for traditional BI already deployed in large corporations. But it does push its promise and potential down to the users who need it most.

Written by :

tracey boxer