A recent report from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) focuses on the benefits of Business Intelligence (BI) tool consolidation and standardization, as well as appropriate strategies for transforming BI from a cluster of fragmented departmental tools into a true enterprise resource.
The report, entitled “Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale”, found that organizations have, on average, 3.2 BI tools from different vendors and 13 BI tools altogether.
While most organizations still purchase best-of-breed products from multiple vendors (55 percent), the purchasing of an integrated suite from a single vendor is gaining popularity and nearing best-of-breed purchases in prevalence (46 percent).
The top three reasons cited for the purchase of multiple BI tools are: different user requirements (54 percent), departmental purchasing autonomy (42 percent), and lack of functionality in a single-vendor toolset (41 percent).
The top challenge for BI-tool standardization efforts is individual resistance to change, according to 48 percent of respondents. Only 9 percent of organizations have performed an ROI assessment of their BI standardization efforts.