Sap Crystal Solutions Make Faster Smarter Business Decisions How Business Intelligence Makes a Difference An IT Directors Perspective

Learn how business intelligence solutions from SAP can transform the way you work in IT.

In this snapshot, a hypothetical IT director talks about how this role and the whole purview of IT have changed over time. Youll get an idea of how business intelligence (BI) software from SAP can help meet the current demands placed on IT to bring value to the business.
An InformAtIon Culture enAblIng everyone to Know exACtly whAtS goIng on Most people who work in IT are fascinated by technology. I would say Im equally fascinated by information or, more accurately, what information can enable people to do. The problem is that these days, companies are generating terabytes of data, but that doesnt necessarily translate into a proportionate increase in understanding of their business or market. Thats why Im a big fan of using business intelligence (BI) to help organizations make sense of their data and extract real value from it. After all, data can be costly to acquire, and its definitely not free to store or manage. Going back barely more than a decade, when our department was still called Management Information Systems, we used to devote an enormous amount of time to pulling reports from systems that even then probably qualified as antiques. Wed progressed from delivering huge dot-matrix printed reports to peoples desks on Z-fold green bar paper, from which they would manually extract and rekey data. With the ability to send comma-delimited files, at least we reduced some of the risk of human error creeping in. Business users would have to fill in a form stating what reports they needed and why, and their request was held in a queue or more accurately, got stuck in a bottleneck.

Fast-forward a few years, and many of those legacy systems were gradually retired and their contents migrated. Data warehousing became a major pre- occupation, and we made early forays into the terrain of business intelligence. But despite our attempts to domesticate it, information chaos was never completely tamed. At that time, business intelligence was really the preserve of specialists. Most of our business users didnt possess the technical capability to master the more sophisticated functionality, and implementations were restricted to localized projects with very specific requirements. Ill admit that not all of those projects were the resounding success they should have been, and some didnt deliver on their full potential in terms of ROI or efficiencies. In hindsight, our BI implementation strategy wasnt as broad or cohesive as it should have been. But to a certain extent, it suited us in IT. The last thing we wanted was the resource burden of giving end users expensive, high-end BI

software on their desktops (an investment that would probably have been largely underutilized) and then having to train them all and administer it all.

We no longer have to create and run reports on users behalf or spend our time maintaining user names and permissions. This is great for users because it decreases thier reliance on us as a department and great for us because were freed up to attend higher value projects.
This actually backfired on us, because business decision makers still needed information, and every department had to employ at least one analyst whose full-time job was to collate it and try to make sense of it. If a system only met 80% of their needs, they would either come to us for a custom answer for the other 20% or would develop a work- around themselves. The Pareto principle was still as valid as ever, as was the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and that was certainly the case with Microsoft Access. The threat of having sensitive or critical data trapped in poorly maintained silos led us to make a policy decision to remove Access from the standard desktop rollout. Our intention was to prevent a rash of maverick databases, written by well- meaning individuals,

from springing into existence. Spreadsheets are still the tool of choice in most small and midsize firms like ours. I dread to think how many poor decisions have been perpetrated over the years because of business users reliance on error-prone, out-of-date data thanks to the ubiquitous and pretty much unregulated use of spreadsheets.

pervasive business intelligence movement. Pervasive BI aims to put information into the hands of everyone who needs it not just tech-savvy super- users or IT analysts. Everythings point and click, and users get selfservice access to live data via their Web browser or everyday productivity tools like Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint. Navigating and interacting with the data feels intuitive and familiar, and users can be confident theyre always working with the most up-to-date information. Tools like SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software (which comes with SAP Crystal Server software), mobile business intelligence, and dashboards put real intelligence within anybodys grasp and enable knowledge workers to do some pretty snazzy stuff with minimal training and support.

Today the landscape has changed entirely. Last year IT was tasked to work with representatives from HR, finance, sales, marketing, and operations in the form of a steering committee to revisit business intelligence from a business perspective as well as a technical one. We put together a comprehensive needs assessment and evaluated the leading providers of BI for small business and departmental deployments. For us, SAP Crystal solutions stood out head and shoulders above the rest for us based on experience, reputation, and stability. Even though we dont run SAP transactional systems, these BI solutions are completely agnostic. SAP Crystal solutions are affordably priced and targeted at smaller companies like ours that share many of the same needs and challenges as big corporations but without the big budgets. SAP Crystal solutions are part of a broader BI platform (SAP BusinessObjects solutions) that has been instrumental in whats called the

Everythings point and click, and users get self-service access to live data via their Web browsers.
We no longer have to create and run reports on users behalf or spend our time maintaining user names and permissions. This is great for them because it decreases their reliance on us as a department and great for us because were freed up to attend to higher-value projects that really need our expertise. Because SAP Crystal solutions are part of this broader SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, if our needs grow to include more sophisticated requirements (such as access to unstructured data;

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performing complex cleansing; or matching customer, supplier, product, and material data so we end up with a single, live view), our solution can grow too. As well as low overall cost of ownership, a major factor in the business case for SAP Crystal solutions was the fact that it allows rapid implementation, which meant we could start getting our moneys worth out of it sooner. Since its based on an open platform, it can grow in both size and sophistication with the needs of our business, so we wont have any problems integrating additional modules in the future. The comprehensive software development kits for Java and Microsoft .NET ensure that we can customize and integrate our BI solution with other systems and technology, seamlessly. Of course, business intelligence hasnt eliminated the use of spreadsheets, but what it does do is provide disciplined linkage from Microsoft Excel back to live

data while enforcing proper distribution and control. So spreadsheets are still a valuable if secondary component of our toolkit. Id say we finally have in place an information culture that enables everybody to know exactly whats going on in the business at any time, from the board- room to the proverbial shop oor. From a purely personal point of view, SAP Crystal solutions have enabled me to be much more hands-off when it comes to the day-to-day information needs of the business. So I can be more involved in shaping and implementing the information strategy that underpins our commercial performance. for more Information To learn how SAP Crystal solutions can help solve your business intelligence challenges, contact an SAP representative or visit us online at www.crystalreports.com