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Building a business case for BI – supporting decision-making and management processes - is different than for systems that support business processes, such as a billing systems. In the latter case, the cost of creating and sending an invoice can be calculated and the invoicing process can be designed to maximize speed and quality, while minimizing the cost. What makes BI different is that it is harder to relate the benefits to the cost. Having the right information is only one component in decision-making, the benefits come from implementing that decision, not the decision-making process itself.
An Oracle Thought Leadership White Paper August 2009 BI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Ambition ............................................................................................ 3 The Five Layers of the BI Business Case .......................................... 6 The BI Business Case Matrix ............................................................ 9 BI Optimization ................................................................................ 11 How Oracle Can Help ...................................................................... 18 Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 2 Introduction Business Intelligence helps you make better decisions . This is how the business value of BI (business intelligence) is often described. No wonder building the business case for BI is elusive. How do you measure the effect of better decisions? How do you determine the quality of a decision to start with? Even if you could tell you would have taken a different decision without BI providing you the necessary information, or with different information, there s no predicting how other decisions would ve played out, leading to different business results. It is no wonder that the subject of how to build a business case emerges every so often. It was a hot topic for organizations introducing BI in targeted places, it became a hot topic when organizations were thinking of a broader BI strategy, and now it is a crucial step for organizations looking to optimize the often fragmented BI that they have. Building a business case for BI supporting decision-making and management processes - is different than for systems that support business processes, such as a billing systems. In the latter case, the cost of creating and sending an invoice can be calculated and the invoicing process can be designed to maximize speed and quality, while minimizing the cost. What makes BI different is that it is harder to relate the benefits to the cost. Having the right information is only one component in decision-making, the benefits come from implementing that decision, not the decision-making process itself. This has been known and accepted for many years, yet with BI having become not only a mainstream topic but a strategic topic in both business and IT, the lack of a decent business case is increasingly unacceptable. As justified and noble a cause better decision-making is, faith is not a business case. Certainly not for a topic as high up the CIO agenda as BI. In this paper we describe how to build a better business case for BI, by understanding the level of ambition organizations can have, and the layers in the business case that should contribute to that level of ambition. We ll highlight two crucial elements that are part of most BI business cases today, the BI competency center and BI tool standardization as examples of how firms are optimizing their BI. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 3 Ambition One of the most important reasons why BI projects fail or any other type of project for that matter is a lack of alignment between what the various stakeholders are looking for. The finance department may simply want a more efficient way to create the monthly management report, while the marketing department recognizes an entirely new way of doing business by sharing information with customers, thus improving the bottom-line. At the same time, IT may have the idea that a proper data warehouse architecture may service the many uncovered needs across the business1. All may use the same words: improve and optimize the BI, but mean something entirely different. If IT takes a too broad a view, setting up a complete infrastructure, while the business is looking for some efficiencies in the current reporting process, the business case will never look good. Conversely, when the business takes a strategic approach, while IT responds with looking for a fancy reporting tool, the business case has no change of succeeding. In short, every good business case starts with a common understanding of the level of ambition the organization chooses to have. There are three levels of ambition, as depicted in figure 1. Efficiency Many business cases are focused on improving efficiency. This means improving a current situation, that is often characterized by fragmentation of information and multiple disparate tools in use, including countless personal spreadsheets. The cost of BI, particularly when BI is 1 In this context, business/IT alignment is a term that is often referred to. This is correct from an IT perspective, where IT is seen as the center of the initiative. Equally important, as the example shows here, is business/business alignment, where the different lines of business (LOB) have the same understanding, to prevent fragmented silo solutions per LOB. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 4 seen as the tactical discipline to create periodic management reporting, is often out of control. Efficiency-based business cases focus on lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the current BI environment, by standardizing on a single BI platform. Next to saving cost, improving the quality and speed of the current processes to create management reporting is important. Efficiency-based business cases can very well be driven by the IT department. Benefits quantification in this realm often focuses on time savings in developing reports and validating data, reduced number of toolsets and maintenance/integration costs, time savings in managing report security, etc. Effectiveness Other business cases have a higher level of ambition: become more effective. This means figuring out how to do better things. Think of embedding BI in business processes, to increase conversion rate in marketing, cross-sell opportunities in the call center, fraud detection, a better matching of available human resources and internal job opportunities, etc. Or think of better management processes, such as replacing an annual financial static budget with a monthly rolling forecast, an integration between the planning and the reporting process where both are based on the same performance indicators, or the introduction of a methodology such as the balanced scorecard, or changing the focus of the management reporting to include stakeholder performance indicators. All of these examples lead to new processes, new ways of working, and new insights. Without BI these things would not be possible within the current business processes. A successful BI initiative improving effectiveness, requires the initiative being driven by the business, as they own the new business and management processes. Benefits quantification in this realm is often additive to the benefits of transactional applications increased marketing or selling effectiveness, improved customer retention, reduced receivables or bad debt expense, etc. Transformation BI initiatives can also be transformational, for instance enabling new business models. Insights driven by BI can drive a completely new customer segmentation, with different service models to support each of those segments. Or BI can be used to back up a new pricing model, based on product or service components that customers can configure themselves on the web when ordering the product. Think of a consumer being able to construct their personal general insurance, and get a tailor-made offering and price based on the selected coverage and socio-demographic indicators. Some organizations take it even further. They see BI as a business itself. They provide BI to their customers, offering relevant information as part of the service. BI becomes a competitive differentiator. Or they start collecting information about the complete value chain, instead of just internal information, to dramatically improve alignment, and eliminate expensive inventory. Not all innovation has to come from products and services, a process can Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 5 be innovative as well. For transformational business cases to succeed, IT and the business need to be totally aligned, as in many of these cases, IT has become the business driver itself. Benefits quantification in this realm may focus on faster time to market (and its associated value), reduced inventory, increased market share, improved P/E ratio, etc. As figure 1 suggests, it is best if the levels of ambition build on top of each other. It is hard to create a sustainable business case aimed at effectiveness or transformation, if there is no basic level of efficiency. Any inefficient situation drains time and capital to be invested in the initiative. It's an attractive idea to see these categories - efficiency, effectiveness and transformation - as a roadmap or maturity model per se. Efficiency is the starting point, transformation the pinnacle in maturity. Although transformation cannot be achieved in an inefficient environment, the levels of ambition are meant to be equal. The point of the levels of ambition is that all involved agree on what should be achieved. And if those goals are reached, another level of ambition can be chosen. This can be a higher level of ambition, but also a lower level again, to revisit efficiency as a 'spring cleanup' after a jump forward in effectiveness. BI is a continuous journey. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 6 The Five Layers of the BI Business Case There is return on investment in BI, if you know how to bring together both cost and benefit. The five layers of the BI business case are designed to do so, regardless of the level of ambition you choose to have. Figure 2 outlines these layers. Figure 2: The Five Layers of the BI Business Case The framework connects costs and benefits based on the premise that, starting at the bottom of the framework, the most important objective of each layer is to enable the next one. A data warehouse is worth nothing if it is not being used to the max. And it is not possible to build a business case other than efficiency if you don t link BI to operational and management processes, and subsequently to the business strategy. By using this approach, it becomes possible to even link infrastructure to the business strategy. Data and infrastructure On the bottom layer of the framework, we include everything related to the data warehouse, data integration and other forms of relevant middleware. It is important to separate infrastructure as a separate layer, as data integration and the data warehouse are used broader than supporting BI alone, in closed-loop architectures they also serve transactional purposes. In general it is safe to Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 7 say that the infrastructure itself does not have a return on investment2. (are U sure??:)) Infrastructures only enable a certain use, like a local area network (LAN) enables email, file sharing and other efficiencies. No organization has calculated the ROI of its LAN! A data warehouse and data integration is no different, it doesn t make sense to try and calculate the ROI. The most important goal of the data warehouse is to enable it s use. In the case of BI, making sure the BI tools and Performance Management Applications can do their work. Business Intelligence Foundation and Performance Management Applications Given the fragmentation in many large organizations there is return on investment in minimizing the number of different and disparate BI tools and applications. As needed as this is, there is a higher purpose, and this is to present a single version of the truth, so that it becomes possible to create a plan based on the same performance indicators as the management reports use for reporting the actuals. Or alternatively, to present a management process that flows through management processes such as gain-to-sustain, investigate-to-invest, design-to-decide, plan-to-act, analyze-to-adjust and record-to-report in a seamless manner3. In essence, this enables the next layer: users having access to the right information, supporting a smooth-flowing management process. Use, Governance, BICC To make sure the process of using BI is organized, organizations that have been successful with BI often have a BICC (business intelligence competence center) in place, governing BI throughout the enterprise4. An increasing amount of organizations are adopting these best practice principles. The goal of this layer is to enable the next one: operational and management processes. Management and Operational Processes Information needs to be put to use. Traditionally, BI has focused on the management processes on a daily, weekly, monthly and for some information even on an annual basis. Increasingly 2 The only return on investment to be found here is saving money by replacing an older environment with a higher TCO. Seldom is this enough to justify the investment. And if an ROI is shown, chances are the TCO of the old situation are so out of control, that the business case should be based on reaching a base-level situation even before thinking of efficiency or any other business case. 3 See Oracle White Paper Management Excellence: How Tomorrow s Leaders Will Get Ahead , www.oracle.com/epm 4 Journal of Management Excellence, Issue #2, Organizing for Management Excellence , www.oracle.com/epm Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 8 operational processes are supported as well in real time, embedding BI components in transactional systems, providing the system or the users with a better context to successfully complete the process. Think of supplying the call center agent with cross-sell opportunities, or helping a temp agency matching supply and demand of personnel in a more intelligent way. The success of each business and management process can be measured using specific key performance indicators5. This contributes to the top and bottom-line, but also enable the top layer of the framework: the business strategy. Business Strategy Business and management processes serve a purpose: allowing the organization to reach its business goals. Organizations can have different business strategies, such as operational excellence to achieve cost leadership, or customer intimacy or product innovation to distinguish itself from the competition in other ways. Through management reporting, traditionally BI provides the information to which extent the organization is successful in reaching those strategic goals. But as the framework shows, BI does something much more important as well: enabling the other layers to do what they should do: making the corporate strategy a success. Regardless of the level of ambition, there always needs to be a set of external metrics or benchmarks to substantiate the potential. Examples for each level of ambition were given earlier in the paper. Ultimately, a business case boils down to financial impact. Possible metrics could include return on investment (ROI), internal rate of return (IRR), net present value (NPV), total cost of ownership (TCO) and payback time. 5 See Oracle White Paper Management Excellence: The Metrics Reloaded , www.oracle.com/epm Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 9 The BI Business Case Matrix Putting together a strong business case requires alignment on these five layers, to avoid suboptimization and a silo-approach. It is not possible to be successful with a transformative initiative, or a business case built on effectiveness, without at least a sufficiently efficient basis. For example, it is not realistic to expect transformational business results from a data warehouse infrastructure that is built to simply enable an efficient information supply. Conversely, putting together a next generation data warehouse and a complete BICC to simply generate some management reports is overkill. This is why the levels of ambition and the layers in the business case should be combined. Figure 3 shows the layers from top to bottom, the levels of ambition from left to right. The cells in the table indicate a sample activity to address in putting together the business case. EFFICIENCY EFFECTIVENESS TRANSFORMATIONAL Business Strategy Operational Excellence Management Excellence New business models Process Saving cost, increasing speed, improving quality Creating a smart, agile and aligned organization New business processes, value chain integration Use and Governance BICC to centralize tool support BICC to creating and share knowledge within the organization Extended BICC, creating and sharing knowledge through the value chain BI Tools and PM Applications Tool standardization Adding new functionality Converge with business process management, business applications, middleware Data and infrastructure Focus on TCO Focus on flexibility Bring in a Service-Oriented Architecture Figure 3: The BI Business Case Matrix In an efficiency based business case, the infrastructure should be aimed at minimizing TCO. BI tools should be standardized on a single one, again to save cost. The BI organization is focused on centralization, and mostly provides support. The purpose of BI is to identify cost saving initiatives, ways of improving the quality of current processes and speeding up existing processes. Most likely this supports the organization s core strategy of being operationally excellent . Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 10 Business cases aimed at effectiveness should be supported by a flexible infrastructure, that supports used that are not even known yet. When choosing BI tools, you should focus on functionality the organization doesn t possess yet, such as specific analytics to improve insight. The organization around BI, the BICC, is aimed at identifying best practices across the organization, and sharing those with others, so that different parts of the organization learn from each other. The focus is on making processes smart (picking up new signals), agile (easy to change a process) and aligned (connecting processes to other processes). The associated business strategy is called management excellence . Transformational business cases aim at creating a new generation infrastructure, most likely SOA based. The BI tools involved should be evaluated based on their convergence with other software areas, such as business process management, integration with business applications such as ERP and CRM, and middleware. The BICC starts to extend itself even outside the enterprise, it becomes the spider in the web for the complete value chain. BI supports new business processes, such as new customer contact channels, collaborative business processes (sourcing, co-innovation), or transforming existing business processes to e.g. customer self-service. This approach fits to new and innovative business models that are being set up. Although technology and business trends come and go and therefore the content of the matrix changes over the years the levels of ambition and the layers of the framework stay the same. Charles Schwab is a leading provider of financial services, with 1.1 trillion in total client assets and over 5 billion in revenue. It deployed Siebel Analytics to 1,200 users in 10 weeks, and has now expanded it to 1,700 financial consultants. The initiative saved 2,400 hours of unproductive work per week, and 5-9% of analytics-driven sales alerts led to new opportunities. "With Oracle Business Intelligence for Siebel Sales, we now have 1,700 financial consultants equipped with right-time visibility into their sales pipeline and performance. We are no longer looking at our Investor Services business through a rear-view mirror. -- KG Muthukumar, Director, CRM and Analytics Solutions Using Oracle BI, car manufacturer Fiat Group extended the geographic perimeter of those countries analyzed in the greatest detail, from five to 32. It provides management with figures on new registrations released by government authorities in the countries monitored. Made more detailed analyses of the company s and competitors sales available broken down not only by model but by sales channel, fuel type, chassis type, etc. We ve gone from a data-pull mode to an information-push mode. Roberto Catto, Manager, Business Intelligence Competence Center, Fiat Group Automobiles LinkShare is a leading provider of full-service online marketing solutions. Using Oracle BI, it delivers intelligence to 1 million merchants and affiliates about their performance-based marketing and business initiatives (e.g., ROI). Merchants & affiliates use dashboards to view transaction histories, commission payments as well as other key metrics. This allows them to understand what ads are successful, and where to run them. The initiative doesn't only provide traditional internal management information, but enables LinkShare clients to optimize their performance and thus maximize the revenues of affiliates, merchants, and LinkShare. BI has become a part of the customer value proposition. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 11 Two trends particularly stand out today, that dominate firms efforts to optimize their BI. One is tool standardization, the other is introducing a BI competency center. BI Optimization In different phases of its life-cycle, BI requires a different business case. The first wave of business cases were about introducing BI for a specific purpose. In many cases the benefits were deemed intangible. How could you know, if the topic is new to you? The second wave of BI involved rolling the concept out on a broader sometimes even enterprise-wide scale. Most business cases were fairly tactical of nature, focusing on addressing a single specific business problem. Today many organizations go through the third wave of the BI business case: BI Optimization. Many small projects, each using their own approach and in many cases their own technology, each may have reached a nice result, but at the cost of an overall very high total cost of ownership (TCO), and therewith a suboptimal return on investment (ROI). Two trends are dominant in this optimization wave: BI tool standardization and establishing a BI competency center (BICC). BI Tool Standardization In most organizations, there is no shortage of BI. In fact, the opposite is the case. Due to decentralized IT budgets, high growth in a good economy, and many mergers and acquisitions, many parts of the organization ended up with their own BI tools, their own definitions and their own management processes. Although perhaps each of these initiatives have a certain degree of success, the total result is one of fragmentation, high cost and low flexibility. BI tool consolidation has been an important driver for BI growth for the last 4 years. In 2005 TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) published a revealing study that showed that on average large organizations have 3 different production reporting tools, 2 different dashboard applications, 3 different OLAP tools, 2 Query and Reporting tools, 1.5 planning and modelling tools and 1.5 data mining tools. The chance to get consistent information out of such a tool landscape is close to zero. A more recent survey, 2008, by Forrester showed a slightly better result, but more than 40% of organizations still use 3-5 different BI tools, and more than 20% of organizations run 6 or more different BI tools. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 12 There are significant benefits to BI tool standardization, according to a recent TDWI study6. Companies that have a predominant BI standard reported a higher success rate and lower failure rate than companies that have not standardized, as shown by figure 4. Figure 4: Tool standardization and BI Success There are different business cases to be made for BI tool standardization, ranging from tactical to more strategic. In the figure 5 different examples are plotted, arranged from low to high impact, and from IT to business driven. 6 Intelligent Enterprise, Cindi Howson, January 26, 2009 TDWI Study Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 13 Figure 5: Business cases for tool standardization. These business cases are: " Low impact, IT driven: development efficiency. If you have an integrated BI enviornment, you can train everyone in the same tool. With the shortage of skills, there is more efficient IT resource allocation " There are also more general cost savings. A better negotiation position with the vendor, lower TCO because of better maintenance " Higher impact comes from improving scalability. If everyone can work of the same definitions and data, just in different ways there is no need for redundant storage. If you can use, within the same toolset, the right capabilities, the use of a single toolset is much more effective. For large deployments for casual users you can use just production reporting (instead of a complete BI toolset), for highly interactive use for knowledge workers the ad-hoc query capabilities (instead of another complete BI toolset) " The biggest value add, however, is to create one version of the truth. This improves transparency, accountability, decisiveness, confidence and business performance. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 14 BI Competency Center The treasury department manages the capital of the organization, the warehouse the raw materials, HR manages the human capital, even the buildings are managed by facilities. But who coordinates the management information? That s the task of the BI competency center (BICC). A Business Intelligence Competence Center (BICC) is an organizational entity that groups interrelated skills, experience, and domain expertise together to promote and deliver BI through a consistent set of skills, standards, and best practices. It delivers repeatable, successful deployments in a way that is beneficial to the entire organization rather than just a single project. Companies that are highly successful with BI, usually have such a competency center driving that success. The success of the BICC will be largely determined by the quality of its people. To serve its target customers effectively, the center needs to acquire a wide range of business, IT, and analytical skills from various parts of the organization. It will seek some of the most talented and sought-after individuals in the company, so a clear mandate and tactful negotiating abilities are important to the recruiting process. Outside experts can provide on-the-job training to fill any internal gaps. Figure 6 shows an overview of the needed skills. 7 Ventana Research, Ingersoll Rand case study Ingersoll Rand Co. has a history of more than 100 years of industrial production and services, of growth and diversification. Today it is a global company with approximately 60,000 employees and some 100 manufacturing facilities around the world. But this diversification also has created duplications and incompatibilities in information systems across the sectors. Directly after standardizing its ERP systems on Oracle, as its next step, the company decided to apply the concept of standardizing through best practices to put tools and systems in place for business intelligence (BI), analytics and reporting. Taking an enterprise-wide approach means Ingersoll Rand can develop standards based on proven best practices and deploy implementations rapidly to business units. BI standardization provides a consistent framework for all reporting and also the capability to consolidate information not just from the strategic platforms but also from our legacy platforms. It also will provide an impetus for the company to migrate from siloed data repositories that impede reporting and decision-making and that it doesn t wish to continue investing in7. "BI becomes a one-stop shop for a common platform, how you get the information you want and also how you report it ." Michael Siebert, global director of integration, reporting and analytics, Ingersoll Rand Co. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 15 Figure 6: Skills in the BICC Organizations should centralize the BI skills they have into a BI competency center, as the BI skills are too scarce, too valuable and too expensive to leave them scattered throughout the enterprise. Enterprises need to realize that it is by leveraging the skills of the BI staff on a strategic level that they can retain these skills and attract new skills from the market. The BI competency center has multiple tasks: " guide the users in self service with regard to repetitive BI tasks (such as management reporting and recurring simple analysis); " do the ad-hoc and difficult analyses themselves (until they become repetitive); " make sure the wheel is not invented over and over, by overseeing the BI initiatives throughout the enterprise. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 16 On each level of ambition the BICC has certain benefits9. On the efficiency level, you should aim for the following benefits: " Control costs: A BICC reduces costs by acting as a central source of BI optimization expertise and ensuring that skills and processes developed for one project can be applied to the next. " Consolidate infrastructure: When the BICC features a test lab for research, proof of concept, prototyping, and advanced training, these tools become accessible to all project teams, eliminating the need to duplicate scarce and expensive resources. " Standardize the IT infrastructure: By endorsing specific solutions, the center can discourage the use of alternate tools, ensuring consistent, cost-effective, and fast implementations of the right systems and processes. " Unify business data: A BICC brings order to data by aligning different projects that use similar information and eliminating the problem of fragmented data infrastructure, which can prevent organizations from monitoring enterprise performance. " Establish an enterprise-wide framework: With a proven model for deploying BI applications, the company can accelerate future development initiatives, resulting in lower costs, improved delivery times, and more effective implementations. For initiatives aimed at improving the organization s effectiveness, you should plan for: " Share knowledge: By consolidating expertise and documenting best practices, the center facilitates knowledge sharing. It can create reusable assets and build competencies that extract maximum value from the organization s BI investment. " Centralize performance management: a BICC provides the entire enterprise with a central platform for managing performance, creating visibility into key indicators, and aligning the application with business objectives. 8 Based on the Journal of Management Excellence, Issue 2, Organizing for Management Excellence 9 Based on the Journal of Management Excellence, Issue 2, Organizing for Management Excellence A good example of a BICC comes from Telecom Italia Mobile8. They have a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence since 1998, this shows the idea of a BICC is really not new or fancy or fashionable. It has proven its value many times. For instance, when TIM was faced with new privacy regulations. Obviously this has an enormous impact across the business, and the BICE has successfully coordinated this in less than 6 months. TIM s BICC is responsible for the BI strategy. It drives new initiatives and makes sure that existing initiatives are coordinated as well. Communicate best practices throughout organization through knowledge transfer, enhance analytical skills of users. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 17 " Strengthen compliance: By promoting best practices for BI, the BICC may ensure ready access to data required for complying with government regulations, such as Sarbanes Oxley, Basel II, and HIPAA. Lastly, the BICC has a role in transformational initiatives: " Manage information to gain a competitive advantage: By enabling a company to share relevant information with customers, the BICC strengthens customer relationships while creating a more customer-centric organization. By sharing information with key suppliers and business partners, the BICC promotes value chain integration, enhancing operational excellence and enabling new sources of innovation. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 18 How Oracle Can Help Oracle BI delivers to business cases, whether they are based on efficiency, effectiveness or transformation. Oracle offers a single solution, from Storage to Scorecard. Oracle offers preconfigured BI applications, that map against multiple business applications, drastically shortening implementation time, and lowering TCO. The capabilities are user self-service, saving significant on IT TCO, and creating scalability. One version of the truth, consistent definitions, are enabled through the common metadata model. Oracle s products and product development efforts in middleware, data quality and integration tools, ETL, MDM, etc..can be used to provide you a technical foundation that will enable you to move seamlessly along the BI maturity model steps and move from siloed, departmental projects to a true, transformational enterprise BI approach. Oracle also has expertise in building and delivering business cases for customers through its Insight program and Oracle Consulting. As a recognized leader in the BI Market, Oracle can bring its global expertise and experience to advise on BI. Oracle's dedicated BI sales and services teams, along with an extensive ecosystem of partners, value added resellers and system integrators, can consult with and advice along any phase in your BI initiatives. More Reading " Ventana Case Study, Making One from Many: Standardized BI and best practices help Ingersoll Rand become a single global entity " Oracle s Journal of Management Excellence, Issues # 4 and 5 " An Enterprise Framework for Business Intelligence, Colin White, BI Research, 2009 " Lead with Intelligence, David Baum, Oracle Magazine, July/August 2009 " BI Belt Tightening in a Tough Economic Climate, Boris Evelson, Forrester, 2009 " TDWI s Best of Business Intelligence: 2008 in Review; Volume 6. " Business Intelligence: Putting Enterprise Data to Work, Economist Intelligence Unit, October 2007 " SWOT: Oracle Business Intelligence Platfom, James Richardson & Dan Sommer, Gartner, June 26, 2009 , Note G00168111 The Oracle Insight program was created to bring Oracle s deep industry experience, technical skills, and extensive knowledge of business and IT issues directly to customers in a one-on-one collaborative setting. Through Oracle Insight, Oracle helps customers identify the critical objectives and challenges for their unique business needs and understand how technology can address them. For more information, visit oracle.com/services/insight. Untitled DocumentBI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for Business Intelligence 19 More information: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/index.htmlUntitled Document BI Optimization: Building A Better Business Case for BI August 2009 Author: Frank Buytendijk, David Landry Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. 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