You are a victim of success. Earlier investments spawned levels of demand for business intelligence and distribution capabilities that cannot be met. You simply can’t scale what you use today without adding people and infrastructure.
You’ve been charged with reducing operational costs while eliminating distribution bottlenecks and errors. And, by the way, you’re expected to leverage existing toolsets.
Users inside and outside of the company are asking for real-time dashboards, self-service reporting tools and support for a variety of mobile devices.
Your business intelligence distribution architecture is (or will be) an enabler for critical enterprise processes. Those reporting capabilities are no longer conveniences or supplements – they strengthen fundamental corporate operations.
You are unable to centrally manage thousands of reports that go to thousands of recipients across the extended enterprise. As well, you need to accommodate a mind-boggling variety of formats, delivery protocols and schedules.
You’ve been told to find a solution for the “action” part of “actionable intelligence”. This means threshold notifications, workflow participation and implementing response capabilities from within business intelligence delivery solutions.
As an IT manager, you may work in an organization that is viewed as an enterprise cost center rather than a strategic asset. If so, you are perpetually squeezed between end-user needs and budget restrictions imposed by your CIO or other spreadsheet-wielding corporate authorities. Figuring out how to make do with what you have and inventing new ways of saving money has become a way of life for you and the people on your team.
How often have you heard this complaint: “I can’t do my job without the right information at the right time. Period.”
In all likelihood, you’re challenged constantly to deliver more and better business intelligence to employees and external parties (customers, partners, suppliers) in the form of reports, data files and dashboards. These need to be generated in a large number of formats and distributed in a variety of ways. And let’s not forget support for a growing variety of mobile devices, most of which are not under corporate control.
In addition, you may have implicit or explicit responsibility for homegrown solutions that are long past their expiration date. The folks on your team are on point to fix them – and no one wants to hear excuses, especially at the end of the month or the fiscal quarter. Or a department swiped a credit card and purchased its own cloud-based solution for business intelligence, reporting or distribution. No matter that it wasn’t vetted or approved by IT – you now need to fix integration problems that are largely outside of your control that will lead to security and privacy issues.
 
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