Challenges of Enterprise Wide Analytic Technology

Most people work in an environment where their department has special forms or procedures that affect the operations of another department within the organization. For example a receiving clerk may receive products and fill out the required paperwork they need to pass the billing up to the finance department. Then the finance department would do what they need to do to pass their information along to the next level in the organization.

Well today many businesses are turning to “Enterprise-wide Analytic Technology” to help streamline the processes and steps that an organization goes through when conducting business. Enterprise analytics is quite simply put a way for enterprise sized companies to capture business-critical information and make it visible across the entire organization. Informatica (2001)

In many businesses today the internal operations of the company run in a manner where the internal departments are treated as individual businesses somewhat like that of a silo or tower standing on its own and operating under its own controls and processes. Enterprise analytics is a way for the enterprise to link the separate business towers and make the critical business information available to all. In many cases the information being tracked is related to the transactions taking place. The transaction is the life blood of any company therefore it is critical to make sure that not only is it processed in as timely a manner as possible but that the information relating to the transaction be accurate across the entire organization.

In addition enterprise analytics must allow for the information to be easily viewed and readable to the persons that must make the critical business decisions that can lead to the success or failure of an organization. Enterprise analytics gives executives a way to see what is happening across the organization at any time. This is the kind of real time knowledge that executives need to keep their companies competitive in the work place.

However, in a utopian business the business intelligence tool deployed would provide all the features and meet the needs perfectly. Today’s businesses are anything but utopian. When an organization looks at deploying a business intelligence tool there can be many factors that will complicate its deployment. Often times challenges such as whether or not the application is intuitive or not will play the largest role in deployment. If an organization is deploying an application where users will be expected to incorporate analytics into their current work role they do not have time for lengthy training programs to bring users up to speed with the technology. InformationWeek Research recently carried out a survey of 300 business technology execs to get their views on business intelligence, how it's used, and where it's going. Sixty percent of respondents cited training as the single largest barrier to enterprise-wide BI deployments.

Does the tool scale? This can be a very critical challenge to implementing a business intelligence tool. Scalability is not just the ability for the application to handle more and more data but also include the cost of the application. With information overload being prevalent among large corporations the application must be able to handle more and more data, users and do so at a cost that does not make the application unusable.

Security is another important factor to deployment. Simply put not all users in the organization need access to the data and therefore an application needs to comply with security requirements and policies set by the organization.

Can the application be administered easily? An application that is responsible for all the important data the organization has but easily administered is a must. Administering a data warehouse that must be available 24x7 puts a lot of burden on database administrators that must support the application. Making that job as easy as possible helps keep the burden of administration down as well as helps to minimize costs associated with the administration of the application.

Many other factors can