Of course, the potential of any unused data is only as good as the quality of the data itself. The success of any BI implementation depends on having clean data to mine. Some companies are so gung-ho about BI that they’ve invested in multiple systems, which may be tough to integrate, says Forrester analyst Laurie Orlov. She says it’s not unusual for larger companies to have at least five BI platforms. She also warns of information overload, citing as a cautionary tale a CIO who said his 100,000 employees all have access to hundreds of dashboards, what Orlov calls a "firehose problem."

Time To Leverage That Data

To get at that data stuck in corporate America’s big-ticket enterprise systems, many companies are turning to BI software. "We’ve seen a number of companies that invested a lot in ERP or CRM that have not necessarily seen the big returns they expected," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. "They’re looking to BI as a way to, with a small additional investment, squeeze additional value out of those systems."

FiberMark North America spent $4.5 million on ERP software from J.D. Edwards and $3.5 million on Oracle, but the manufacturer of specialty packaging and paper couldn’t easily get at the data. "Typically, ERP systems collect data wonderfully, but don’t report out worth a darn," says Joel Taylor, director of IS. "We were desperate to get good information quickly." Taylor spent less than $75,000 on QlikView—BI software from QlikTech that grabs FiberMark’s data from J.D. Edwards, Excel spreadsheets, and Oracle and Access databases, and stores it in the server’s RAM (eliminating the need for a data warehouse).

Now, instead of printing 1,000-page monthly sales reports for each of FiberMark’s 29 salespeople, Taylor’s staff has shown them how to access the data from the corporate intranet any time they want. "With a very short training cycle (15 minutes), they’re up and flying," says Taylor. "They print four pages, not 1,000." He says the system paid for itself in nine months in saved paper, toner, and printer wear and tear alone. More important, though, salespeople and executives can get at data that’s refreshed daily.

When Quaker Chemical began operating as a global entity in 1999, newly appointed CIO Irving Tyler suddenly had to create a single global view from 14 transaction systems. Tyler had already built data warehouses for U.S. and European customer and product information, so he decided to scale up into a global data warehouse, giving users access through an Internet-based BI tool from SAS. The whole process took three months.