Let there be light

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BADENHORST: SAS sees BI as looking at historical data while analytics is looking at forward analysis for your business.

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THOMAS: The push being made by vendors like SAS to make analytics its own seperate field is nothing but marketing.

"BI is not about a package, it can be delivered to you but basically it's a combination of the tools at your disposal to make those kinds of decisions based off the data that is being entered from the workflow and from the sales department," he said.

"For us, BI is distributed amongst a couple of tools, we have a lot of ERP software tailored for our needs which is from a company based originally in India, who developed this software for a number of companies," added Bamps.

Understanding in the Middle East

Ahmed Al Mulla is no stranger to BI. As the CIO of Dubai Aluminium he has initiated a BI pilot programme designed as a proof of concept before rolling out the software to the rest of the business. According to Al Mulla, the level of understanding of BI as a technology in the Middle East is not on par with organisations in the rest of the world.

"There is a reason why it is not, the majority of IT is not at the same level, so naturally [it is the same with] BI, which is a value-add product that comes on top of your systems. For you to use BI effectively, your transaction-level system, your ERP and so on has to be quite stable in the sense that it is almost complete. Most organisations in the Middle East are still really only doing automation projects and so on," he says.

Al Mulla explains that the level of understanding is a key challenge, as often your executives will come in and say they want BI, but they don't even know what it is.

Many organisations can benefit from BI, Al Mulla points out, as they are gaining insights that may not have been clear before, even if you have a handle on the competition.

"CIOs themselves have to take the leadership and ownership role and perhaps be more involved in business," he adds.

The need for greater education in the marketplace is a sentiment that is echoed by end users and vendors alike, particularly with the amount of acquisitions that have taken place in the market.

Paul Hammond, regional VP for the Middle East at Infor Global Solutions, producers of the Infor PM BI tool, believes that with the consolidation comes opportunity, as maybe everyone that was a Cognos or Business Objects customer does not now want to be with the likes of IBM, SAP or Oracle.

"I am hopeful that the likes of Cognos and Business Objects will have done the educational piece, that's with respect to them, when you bring in a new technology you do spend a good 18 months just going to the market and educating them. I think a lot of ground work has been done, and we bring an alternative spin to that and the market will see us as another major vendor that is playing in that space," he says.

Azam Dabbagh, managing director of ICSME, distributors of the BI product QlikView, believes that the need for education is important to ensure end users have the appropriate background knowledge on the software.

"CIO understanding is usually related to the technology - they have to build the technology, they have to build the online analytical processing, so they are more focused on the technology rather than the business value that you can build to answer questions for the business user," he says.

This is not to say that once the market improves in BI understanding that it will suddenly become a mainstream technology. The collapse of several titans of the financial sector last year showed that nothing is certain in business; however there is an argument to be made that BI can grant you better insights into your operations and clarify some of the uncertainty in enterprise decisions. The flipside is that a rather large cheque will have to be parted with to bring in the required software and resources to take the wrapping off a shiny new BI implementation.

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