Beware of Performance Management Pitfalls
Discver the basic mistakes in implementation and how to avoid them. [PDF - 510KB]

"Is SAP Ready to BI?" – Mark Smith asks if SAP is serious about business intelligence

"Ventana Research believes that organizations should build a specific BI strategy that is independent of their application server and transaction applications like ERP, SCM and CRM to minimize the risk of project delays and time to providing access to critical business information across the enterprise." – Mark Smith, CEO and EVP Research, Ventana Research, "Oracle Re-Enters BI Market Seeking Leadership Position," April 2006.

In their White Paper, Evaluation Criteria for Selecting a Successful Business Performance Management Solution, Kathleen Wilhide and Dan Vesset outline key criteria for successful business intelligence platforms. They include:

• A common enterprise data model encompassing global variables.
• Integrated reporting and analytics servers that support the needs of multiple users.
• A common graphical user interface provides a uniform user experience and ensures end-user familiarity with features and functions.
• Collaboration and workflow for automating processes.
• Data integration capabilities to ensure quality and consistency by extracting and standardizing information from multiple systems.

Download the response from Cognos, an IBM company [ZIP - 280KB]

In the report, A Business Approach to Right-Time Decision Making, Wayne Eckerson outlines some of the IT challenges in providing business users with timely information and provides recommendations for solving them. Download the report and learn:

• What business users need from their operational systems.
• The role of dashboards and alerts in enabling right-time decision-making.
• The relationship between Enterprise Information Integration (EII) and business intelligence.

Download the report [PDF - 490 KB]

"The MR1 release [of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence] offers better integration to SAP's portal as well as a variety of new functions that mimic relational database management systems (RDBMS) options not currently available within SAP BW.

Of specific interest is a union function that allows for merging of data from different BW instances or between BW and another RDBMS. This feature fits the bill for those companies that want a blended environment – SAP BW and other data sources." – John Hagerty, "BI Competition Heats Up Around SAP," May 11, 2006.

Download the full report [PDF - 62 KB]