There is one thing I know about people and that is that they like things to be simple and easy. If your favorite shopping area is a mile from your house, you won’t drive an extra five miles to get to that great store on the outskirts of town. You might drop by if you happen to be in the neighborhood, but the business owner can’t count on your business on an ongoing basis.
The same is true of your business intelligence solution. If the solution is ‘out of the way’ or hard to use, if it isn’t integrated with enterprise apps, if it doesn’t bring critical information into a one-stop shop environment, your team will not want to use the solution, no matter how powerful it may be (no matter how much time and money you spent to implement the solution).
The name of the game is ease-of-access and ease-of-use. The idea is to make it easier for your team to gather and analyze data and move on to make a confident decision, and complete the tasks they have to accomplish by the end of the workday. What you need is an integrated, embedded BI tool that will support your business users out of the box; one that is mobile and accessible, and has sophisticated tools, but is easy to use, and access. Who wants to deal with multi-platform hassles? NO ONE!
When you consider a business intelligence solution, remember the example I gave about shopping convenience. You are building a self-serve business intelligence environment that will encourage user adoption and make it easy for users to bring together data from enterprise systems. You WANT people to ‘shop’ in your BI store! Right?
Oh, and there is one other advantage to adopting the integration and embedded approach to BI tools; namely that your IT team will find it easier to maintain and manage the solution and to plan for future needs and growth without spending a lot of time and money trying to ‘make it work’.
Get it right the first time! Don’t be the business owner struggling to survive on the outskirts of town! Integrate and embed BI into the enterprise and its applications and encourage user adoption and IT team satisfaction! Ready to Use Business Intelligence
