Contemporary offer business objects consulting services, delivering a strategy that allows businesses to understand their data. Data warehousing and reporting design services. Contemporary are the Business Intelligence Experts. The product range covers Business Objects, Microsoft Business Intelligence as well as Crystal Reports.
     
 
 

Business intelligence enables businesses to make faster decisions.

Business intelligence (BI) is increasingly being said by many to be the management tool that will enable organisations to survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive world.

Some BI vendors, such as the SAS Institute, have been involved with BI for over thirty years while others such as Microsoft have only recently jumped on to this bandwagon.




  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

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One of the key indicators that any technology, or more correctly in this case a business technique, has entered the mainstream of business is the flurry of acquistitions on a major scale in that sector. In the BI space, this has been reflected by companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle, HP and Microsoft all getting into the act. Interestingly, however, as all these companies maintained that their software products were already BI enabled, so it begs the question why did these huge and costly acquisitions take place?

Essentially, BI is about the extraction of key information from data to enable the decision-makers to make more informed choices rather than depending on old fashioned ‘gut instincts’. Richard Moore, Microsoft’s business manager for the information worker products group, says that "BI can operate at three different levels, individual, team and enterprise."

Until Microsoft’s recent purchase of ProClarity, all the company’s BI tools were based around MS SQL Server 2005 integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system. With the acquisition of ProClarity, which has been renamed as the Performance PointServer 2007, the company can now compete in the enterprise space. Microsoft say this makes BI available to a large number of users at an affordable price.

BI is all about processes and people and goes beyond the traditional reporting structures built into many IT-based systems. Organisations must look beyond ERP to maintain their strategic advantage and BI is seen as the next step, one that can feed off the vast amount of data generated by ERP systems.

BI enables insights into the vast banks of information that in many cases already exist in organisations and actually encompasses many techniques.

The starting point for BI is to establish what questions need to be answered in the first place if the strategic position of the company is to be improved. Like any data-based activity however, the GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) applies, and it has been observed that the cost of a BI system is typically about 10pc of an ERP system, but that the ROI is very much better.

Perhaps the formula:- skill + intelligence + insight = top performance indeed says it all..





 

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