BI Action
Until recently, the BI market was highly fragmented. There were big database vendors and then a slew of small vendors who fill in the database ecosystem with specialized query, reporting, analysis, and data management tools and applications.

In March, Oracle announced plans to acquire Hyperion Solutions, a specialized financial pure-play BI player. Oracle will have to merge Hyperion’s BI capabilities with its own BI functionality and sort out its existing customers from among Hyperion’s 12,000 customers, many of which, reportedly, are customers of Oracle rival SAP.

Also in March, Accenture teamed up with SAS, another pure-play BI analytics vendor. Specifically, the two companies plan to work together to enhance Accenture’s SAS capabilities and also enhance SAS software by leveraging Accenture’s industry expertise, according to Accenture. In short Accenture will be able to use SAS’s vaunted analytics to bolster its own Accenture Information Management Services (AIMS) organization, while SAS gets access to the huge global Accenture sales and customer network. Of course, Accenture also maintains partnership and alliance relationships with Oracle and Hyperion.

BI clearly remains a big opportunity for consulting firms. Every top-tier consulting firm and most second-tier firms maintain alliances with the big BI database vendors and with various BI tool vendors. BearingPoint is typical  “We have relationships with Oracle and also with IBM, SAP, Google, and Microsoft,” says Molley.

Tools or Vision?
Although the latest news has focused on BI tools, BI consultants question whether the problem with BI is not tools but the lack of BI vision on the part of corporate executives. A number of factors have contributed to the failure of BI in the executive suite. “BI was never a top business problem, until now,” says Harris.

First came the technology excuses. “They didn’t have the data available or they didn’t have the processing power,” says Harris. Certainly, the complicated database joins did require considerable computer processing horsepower, which was a costly and carefully rationed resource as recently as a decade ago. Big queries could bring even the beefiest mainframe to its knees. “But now the power is there,” she notes. With multicore, multiprocessor, scale-out, and scale-up systems, technology definitely is not a BI constraint today.

Another obstacle was computer-phobia among C-level executives. “The previous generation of C-level executives didn’t use computers,” says Harris. They expected admins and secretaries to use the computers for them. Many couldn’t even type a letter on their own, never mind search a file system or query a database. However, “now there is a new generation of leaders in the C-suite, and they all use laptops,” she continues. You can’t get out of B-school today without mastering PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, Google search, and other sophisticated tools.

But having the computer skills and using the computer to access and analyze information for decision-making are two different things. The challenge today is the vast amount of data that must be captured, processed, aggregated, and presented. “Managers are looking at mountains of information. To make sense of it, they need linkages to the broader enterprise view. They need to come to agreement around measurements and metrics and definitions,” Molley continues. That’s a vision and strategy thing, not tools.

For example, Molley cites the situation of the large bank in which different business units all keep data on their customers. In effect, the customer is owned by the business unit. The same person, however, often is a customer of different business units, which complicates the BI picture. Each stores, manages, and analyzes the data in different ways. “The challenge is really at the enterprise level,” he says, which will require BI vision and strategy to solve.