Business Intelligence Across the Organization

In the 1984 Steven Spielberg movie, "Gremlins," Zach receives a cute but mysterious pet from Chinatown as a birthday gift from his father, unaware of the magnitude of his responsibility in respecting the three rules for its care. By breaking one of the rules, the young man unwittingly unleashes a wave of havoc as the gremlins mutate and multiply uncontrollably, almost bringing his hometown to its knees. Through his ordeal, Zach learns that a seemingly benign thing, not correctly cared for, can lead to unforeseen and sometimes detrimental consequences. Today, we could apply a similar lesson to business intelligence (BI). BI is the technology that allows organizations to access, analyze, and share information in order to drive more informed business decisions. It is increasingly recognized as key for business success, as evidenced by the continued strong growth of this market, estimated to reach nearly $12 billion by 2005 [see 1].

However, the BI market has drawn multiple and generally incompatible vendor offerings. Consequently, as Gartner puts it, there is a strong risk that "through 2005, users will adopt a staggering amount of disparate and unrelated BI technologies […] adding to BI fragmentation in organizations [2]."

It is these disparate BI technologies that are the "BI Gremlins." The rule for their care – defining an enterprise-wide BI strategy and standard – is often neglected. As they continue to proliferate, the consequences will become increasingly visible:

As an IT executive, you are concerned with standardizing infrastructure and leading crossenterprise initiatives in order to bring increased business value to your users. By setting in motion a BI standardization initiative today, you can reap savings in time, resources, and eventual frustration, while delivering the benefits of enterprise BI: deeper business insight, a more collaborative work environment, and a 360° customer view.

In the first section of this paper we look at factors hindering business intelligence standardization today. We then investigate the consequences of this lack in standardization and how the establishment of a BI standard can resolve the associated issues and lead to significant benefits, as illustrated by case studies of successful enterprise BI deployments. In the final section, we recommend an approach in moving forward with enterprise BI standardization.

It has almost become a cliché to say that information is the currency of the new economy. Yet it is undeniably true. Fast and easy access to reliable and actionable information now represents the ultimate competitive advantage. Information drives the myriad of business decisions in today’s flattened organizations. Information allows companies to acquire, retain, and grow an increasingly volatile customer base. Information helps streamline processes and identify new revenue opportunities. Today, as John D. Rockefeller once said, "He who has the most information, wins."

But achieving access to information is no trivial task. The issue is not the quantity of data available. Online data has experienced exponential growth in the last decade with the advent of ERP systems and the web, reaching about a million terabytes in size. The problem is how to access data distributed over multiple systems and geographies, and how to turn that data into meaningful information.

The BI industry has dedicated over a decade of research and development to address this Challenge [3]. BI technology enables quick and easy access to data wherever it is located. It provides the tools to understand the data in context, thereby turning it into actionable information.

Finally, it allows the sharing of that information across the extended enterprise – on the corporate intranet, helping employees make more informed decisions, and over the customer and supplier extranets, helping build stronger and more profitable business relationships.

• Reduced costs

• Increased revenues

• Improved customer satisfaction

By providing organizations with a clear understanding of their business processes, companies can easily identify operational inefficiencies, helping to reduce costs. For example, Fiat estimates saving about $45M since the implementation of its enterprise BI system.

Through business intelligence, companies can differentiate their offerings from the competition by providing information-based services to their customers. Increased revenues are obtained through new customer acquisition or directly from the information-based services. For example, Owens & Minor estimates a gain of $60M annually from new customer acquisition thanks to its BI extranet.

By enabling self-service access to information across an extranet for customers, partners, and suppliers, companies can reduce support costs and improve satisfaction for each of these groups. For a more detailed study of these benefits and the return on investment (ROI) that can be expected from a BI deployment, please refer to Appendix A.

Not surprisingly, business intelligence has also received considerable attention from vendors eager to cash in on this interest. The term "business intelligence" is all too readily applied to any application capable of generating even the most basic reports. It seems that everyone from enterprise application vendors to database vendors now offer "business intelligence solutions."

It is clear that a comprehensive BI strategy cannot be satisfied by these point solutions. However, as BI functionality may be bundled into other applications or inherited through acquisitions, or because the given functionality may meet the immediate needs of a subset of users, companies are finding themselves with a patchwork of incompatible BI technologies that cannot respond to the deeper and broader needs of the organization.

It is this patchwork that will impede companies from realizing many of the benefits of business intelligence. And the danger is very real. As Gartner puts it, "Through 2005, broad-scale adoption of packaged applications will prevent more than 50% of large organizations from establishing complete perspective through BI (0.7 probability) [9]."

Due to its growing importance, business intelligence is appearing at all levels of the organization. Lacking a common BI standard, companies risk finding themselves with a patchwork of incompatible technologies that will increasingly create problems and will prevent many of the benefits that BI brings. The lack of BI standardization can impact an organization on three levels:

• Business

• IT

• Customer

The selection of a business intelligence solution, from the initial identification of candidate vendors to the final proof of concept, can be a lengthy and costly process taking weeks or even months and involving both IT and end users. With the current rate of adoption of BI, this process is, in many cases, being repeated unnecessarily at various levels within the organization.

Now more than ever, companies are examining their suppliers on financial viability. The cost of having to support or migrate solutions from vendors that have gone under or that have been acquired is just too prohibitive. Today it is essential to go with the tried and proven, to go with the market leader.

As the patchwork of different BI tools grows, the complexity and cost in learning, administering, and integrating the various technologies increase dramatically.

Depending on the user requirement, he or she may have to be trained on multiple BI tools. In some cases, because the information they are looking for comes from disparate systems with distinct BI interfaces, users will have to rely on IT to resolve the integration, leading to unnecessary work and frustration for both IT and the end user.

Having multiple tools means having multiple security infrastructures for administering users. This ultimately leads to a less secure and less reliable environment since more tools results in a higher likelihood of error and security breach.

Without a common BI framework, multiple versions of the truth will occur. For example, the answer to "What is the revenue for product A?" may vary from one system to another, depending on how revenue is defined and how clean the data is. Users will have huge difficulties trying to communicate and collaborate in such an environment, as there is no common understanding of the terms being employed.

Lacking a common BI framework, a request as simple as, "Give me the list of purchase orders and support issues concerning my customer," will be difficult to obtain if the information comes from disparate systems. These information stovepipes (in applications and departments) result in partial or departmentalized views of the business, impeding users from obtaining a full understanding of their business activities and leading to sub-optimal decision making. Also, employee mobility, key to the personal development programs that exist in many companies, will be inhibited if users have to learn a new BI tool every time they move departments.

We have now seen the problems related to the lack of a common BI framework. By standardizing BI you can help reduce the time, resource, and frustration costs that we have identified. As Meta Group puts it: "The avoidance of unnecessary BI product proliferation is critical for costeffective deployments… IT organizations can save costs by setting corporate BI tool standards [12]."

Moreover, BI standardization not only helps eliminate these costs but also delivers significant benefits. Here we summarize the benefits you can realize from standardizing business intelligence across the organization. Case studies of successful business intelligence deployments at Fiat, Ingram Micro, and Allegiance Healthcare can be found in Appendix B.

A common BI standard means that you can easily bridge existing information stovepipes (for example in your ERP and CRM applications) in order to achieve a more holistic view of your business activity. For example, you might combine information from your ERP system and your e-commerce application to correlate online and offline spending to understand which channel is more effective for a given product.

A common BI standard means that users can easily move from one department to another without having to learn another tool to access their information – improving employee mobility and effectiveness. The common semantics defined in an enterprise-wide BI framework mean that all users, independent of their department, have the same understanding of shared terminology helping to promote teamwork and idea sharing.

With an overarching BI framework, customer information can easily be consolidated from multiple data sources (e.g., CRM, ERP, web applications) to obtain a comprehensive 360° understanding of customer value, behavior, etc. This consolidated view can then be distributed to all customer touch points throughout your organization to ensure consistent cross-enterprise handling of your customers.

In a 2001 BI survey of 600 businesses, there was a clear indication that analytic applications are gaining in importance [14]. According to the survey, "at least half of the respondents stated that they expect to increase their budget for analytic applications." Analysts are viewing this growth positively as analytic applications help deliver greater business value faster to end-users.

But Gartner warns, "Most enterprises still purchase BI applications on a ‘one-off’ or tactical basis in response to specific user demands. This can create a patchwork of applications that is difficult to maintain and support [15]." By establishing a common BI standard, you set up the foundation into which all analytic applications will be integrated, eliminating a potential patchwork and delivering maximum business value to your users.

The picture is clear. There is a growing need to define a common BI framework. By doing so, businesses will save many of the costs in time and resources they are incurring today. They will also position themselves to experience the benefits of true enterprise-wide insight.

The question now is how? Experience has led us to formulate the following three-step approach:

• Raise BI standardization to a strategic level

• Set up a task force to select the BI standard

• Adopt a phased approach

The first step in tackling BI standardization is to create awareness at the executive level of the costs being incurred due to a lack in BI standards and of the benefits that can be achieved through standardization. Executives need to understand that the proliferation of disparate BI systems will increasingly lead to highly visible problems at the business, IT, and customer levels. This proliferation must be stopped. And the sooner, the better. Once executive backing has been achieved, the task of driving enterprise-wide standardization will be much easier. This paper can provide some help in identifying where your organization is being penalized most by the lack of BI standards. It will also help you recognize the key benefits you will gain from standardization.

Choosing an enterprise BI standard is integral to the success of the BI standardization initiative. In particular, it is important that your choice does not simply default to a solution that may already exist at the departmental level. Scaling BI to the enterprise level extends requirements well beyond departmental needs. Moreover, when choosing a BI standard, it is important to evaluate not only the suitability of the BI solution, but also the viability of the solution provider.

In order to select the right BI standard, it is recommended that you set up a cross-functional and cross-divisional task force made up of end-users and IT so that all needs are duly considered. The goal of the task force should be to identify a single BI standard. There may be situations where niche requirements will call for a specific tool but, provided the BI solution is carefully chosen, the majority of needs will be satisfied by the standard.

When standardizing enterprise BI, certain evaluation criteria for the BI partner and solution, outlined below, must be satisfied in order to ensure the success of the project. These criteria should be considered in conjunction with specific requirements that the task force will identify.

In choosing the appropriate partner to accompany the strategic initiative of rolling out an enterprise BI standard, three factors should be considered:

There are many challenges involved in scaling a business intelligence solution to the enterprise level. On the one hand, total cost of ownership (TCO) must be closely examined in order to avoid unnecessary training, maintenance, and administration costs often due to poor product integration; on the other hand the solution needs to demonstrate enterprise-level capabilities, which we believe to be the following:

Once a BI standard has been selected, an effective rollout is crucial to ensure that BI standardization is achieved. However, it is unlikely that standardization can be achieved in a single pass. Instead, it is advised that you bring in the BI standard and phase out non-standard incumbents in a step-by-step manner, as follows:

• Contain non-standard incumbents by stopping their spread beyond existing seats.

• Promote the BI standard internally through extensive end-user and IT training. Training should include benefits inherent to the BI standard and to the standardization itself.

• Ensure careful rollout so that both IT and end-users are sufficiently prepared and that implementation is as painless as possible.

• Consider setting up a sponsorship model whereby only the BI standard is corporate-funded and any non-standard BI is paid for by the individual department or business unit.

The BI Gremlins are out there. And, unbeknownst to many organizations, they are quietly multiplying into a patchwork of disparate technologies. As this proliferation continues, the damage in terms of cost, frustration, and lost competitive advantage will become increasingly apparent at the business, IT, and customer levels. Only by respecting the rule for their care – the definition of an enterprise BI strategy and standard – can this damage be avoided and can their true qualities shine through: the ability to provide deeper business insight, a more collaborative work environment, and a 360° customer view.

Business intelligence is extremely important in today’s information age. If BI is not raised to a strategic agenda and if an enterprise standard is not defined, organizations risk finding themselves burdened with an increasingly complex BI patchwork – without ever benefiting from true enterprise insight. And as Gartner warns, the danger is very real.

Those organizations that address this issue today will be the winners of tomorrow. As DM Review puts it, "This new millennium will be a knowledge economy, and those [...] that enable themselves now as business intelligence enterprises will be the survivors of the future [16]."

Business Objects has become the enterprise BI standard of choice, both in terms of company viability and product offering. In this section we briefly describe the Business Objects company, following the criteria we previously defined for choosing the right BI partner. An evaluation of the Business Objects product offering can be found in Appendix C.

Business Objects is recognized as the market leader in business intelligence. It is the only major BI vendor to have maintained strong growth in both revenues and profits. Consequently it continues to gain market share – latest IDC numbers indicate that Business Objects is 50% bigger than its main competitor in the query and reporting market [17].

Because of its leadership position, Business Objects has become the preferred platform for other software vendors looking to embed BI in their offerings. OEM deals with market leaders such as Siebel and i2 are indicative of this. In the wider business arena, Business Objects has also become a recognized leader with, for example, its CEO ranked in the top 10 list of CEO Magazine’s annual survey [18].

Business Objects has become the enterprise BI standard for Fortune 500 companies, whether for corporate intranets or customer facing extranets. As described in Appendix C, the Business Objects product suite fully satisfies the enterprise BI requirements of ease of use, scalability, security, and extensibility. It is for this reason that Business Objects has more 10,000+ license intranet customers and more extranet customers than any other BI vendor. Business Objects has over 13,500 customers, is present in more than 80 countries, and has hundreds of partners worldwide. "We needed a vendor that could support a scalable, global deployment. The stable products, worldwide infrastructure, and proven success of enterprise deployments from Business Objects made it an easy choice as our enterprise standard."

"Business Objects has helped us to realize our vision of creating a customer service extranet."

"[Business Objects] will allow us to capitalize on the size and high transaction volumes of our dynamic community, to better understand our users, and enable continued improvements that will benefit the eBay community."

"Fiat has already realized some $45 million in returns [thanks to the data warehousing project and Business Objects]."

Business Objects is positioned as the "Enterprise BI Suite" leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants that grade vendors on vision and execution [19]. It is recognized as the BI vendor with the best vision and best execution, leading with technologies such as BI extranets, mobile BI, and enterprise analytic applications. A Hurwitz paper discussing a Business Objects mobile BI release stated, "By reinvesting in research and development to meet future product requirements, Business Objects is demonstrating that it will provide leadership and technology to support the long-term strategies of its customers [20]."

Business Objects continues to receive many industry awards. It has won the InfoWorld Readers’ Choice Award and the DM Review Readership’s Award as best BI product of the year. It was also voted by Intelligent Enterprise as one of the 12 Most Influential Companies in IT for the third year running.

The core benefit of business intelligence is that it helps turn information into knowledge into Profit [21]. This benefit can be further refined as reduced costs, increased revenues, and improved customer satisfaction. Let’s take a brief look at each benefit in the examples below:

Although the benefits of business intelligence may now seem apparent, is the ROI compelling enough to justify expenditure in an economic climate where IT budgets are being frozen or even reduced? Evidence from those with BI systems already in place would indicate that BI is even more necessary in today’s uncertain economy. In DM Review, Richard Hackathorn proposes BI as "an e-medicine for alleviating the recession impacts" on companies [23]. This is because BI, unlike any other technology, provides companies with real visibility over their business enabling them to react quickly in a changing economic climate. Also, as InformationWeek reports, investments in business intelligence by companies such as IBM and Cisco are resulting in cost savings that can make up for declines in revenue [24]. It is therefore not surprising that only 16% of CIOs surveyed by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter said that BI would likely be cut from their budget in a slowdown [25]. In a difficult economic climate there is increased pressure for IT executives to deliver visible returns on their investments – to make high impact IT investments. In the Morgan Stanley survey, the surveyed CIOs identified business intelligence as one of the highest ROI software projects.

Some examples of the benefits business intelligence can bring in an economic downturn:

• Business intelligence leads to true business insight and helps avoid disaster in a slowing economy. Real-time value chain visibility can help keep expenses in balance with declining revenue.

• Business intelligence helps understand customers and hold on to them. Focusing on customer satisfaction will go a long way to improving the bottom line without forcing companies to incur large expenses in attracting new customers.

• Business intelligence leverages existing investment in enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SCM) by rapidly delivering visible business value to end users.

For a more in-depth analysis of this subject, please refer to the white paper "Business Intelligence: Now More Than Ever [26]."

Allegiance Healthcare uses an enterprise business intelligence system called ASPIRE (Allegiance Sales, Pricing, and Integrated Reporting) to give Allegiance sales representatives the capabilities to better understand their customers’ purchases. Using ASPIRE, sales representatives can identify cost-saving opportunities and make standardization recommendations, such as contract purchases and purchases of Allegiance’s own line of "Best Value" products. Allegiance’s goals in the project were three-fold.

The first goal was to reduce the IT staff that supports the sales force. Before ASPIRE, Allegiance had five IT groups, consisting of 10 people, supporting 17 sales organizations and seven different types of reporting systems. That was reduced to one IT group, consisting of four people, to support a sales force of 1,100, all using the same unified system. The rest of the team was redeployed to other projects.

The second goal was to make the data both more consistent and current. Allegiance previously provided different cuts of data to various sales groups. Each cut of data originated from a different reporting system. When sales representatives from different Allegiance product lines came together to create corporate-wide customer proposals, they found inconsistencies in the numbers. Using ASPIRE, which is sourced from only one data warehouse, Allegiance was able to offer its sales force the same enterprise-wide data concerning customers, products, purchasing, and pricing.

The third goal was to make training of sales representatives easier and to make collaboration among them a possibility. Rather than constantly having to learn new systems as they moved from one sales group to another, sales representatives now use the same tool. Trainers, too, only need to learn one system and can train any combination of sales representatives, regardless of the product lines involved. ASPIRE’s common user interface also has allowed sales representatives to identify opportunities in their customer base and to share applicable ones with the rest of the Allegiance sales team.

ASPIRE was part of a larger business systems overhaul implemented by Allegiance called the Horizon project. Allegiance replaced its key business systems with an SAP ERP system for managing data and built a separate decision-support data warehouse for enterprise business intelligence. Since implementing Horizon, Allegiance has been able to save $10 million per year in IT expenditure and deliver a better level of service to its business users.

The WIP project combines data from four disparate information sources:

1. Clickstream data

2. Sales data

3. Customer feedback data

4. Infrastructure data (information on system performance, such as system uptime, and peaks/lows in system usage)

With access to this combined data, Ingram can run a much more intelligent organization. It enables the following:

The Italian carmaker had money going up in smoke, but didn’t know it. Fiat Auto maintains a worldwide network of parts suppliers for its automobiles, but before installing an enterprise business intelligence system on top of a data warehouse, managers had no practical way of tracking, comparing, managing, and minimizing costs for those components.

A revelation of the value that such a system could provide came during its testing phase on a part as pedestrian as the ashtray. During the testing phase, IT engineers detected a large discrepancy in the prices that Fiat was paying for the ashtrays in a pair of vehicles. The data warehouse enabled comparative analyses of various component prices. Curiously, the engineers discovered that the ashtray for the economy model Fiat Punto cost about 50% more than the ashtray for the luxury model Alfa 166.

The IT staff was the first to discover this interesting data and alerted the purchasing department. The purchasing managers could not believe it and initially thought there was a mistake in the information. Per individual ashtray, the sum of money at stake was not huge – ashtrays go for a couple of dollars – but with 650,000 Puntos rolling off assembly lines each year, the costs quickly mounted. Armed with its nugget of intelligence, Fiat was able to renegotiate prices with the supplier of the Punto ashtray and is now saving several hundred thousand dollars a year.

Business Objects has always placed significant focus on integration, preferring in-house development to product acquisition. In the rare cases of acquisition, the acquired technology has been imbedded at the deepest level. It is for this reason that the Business Objects offering is integrated both at the front end, providing query, reporting, and analysis capabilities from a single interface, and at the back end, working off a common server, metadata, and security infrastructure. This extremely tight integration ensures that the Business Objects solution offers the lowest possible TCO. For more information on how to calculate and reduce the TCO of a BI deployment, please refer to the white paper "The Decision Support TCO – Calculating and Reducing TCO [27]."

Sometimes users will just need to view and refresh reports but, depending on their profile or current requirements, may also want to analyze the report data or create their own reports. Business Objects provides all this functionality within a single tool. This means that users only have to learn one tool and can easily and seamlessly move from one task to another without having to change tools.

Ease of use also means that users have access to their information wherever they are and whatever their preferred device is. Business Objects leads the industry in providing mobile business intelligence. Users can access their information whether from a browser, PC, mobile phone, or PDA.

Business Objects has been designed to minimize the burden on IT staff while allowing them to maintain control. First, Business Objects provides all query, reporting, and analysis functionality within a single tool. IT does not have to worry about managing and integrating multiple tools. Second, as it is so easy to use, users can create, analyze, and share their own reports without having to rely on IT. However, IT remains in control as it defines all resource access.

Ease of administration also means that the BI solution must integrate with existing IT infrastructure. Business Objects maintains an open platform policy so that it works with all major operating systems, browsers, application servers, and web servers. Also, Business Objects is ensuring integration with third party vendors and service providers through its open API and strategic integration partnerships. Examples of these partnerships include the Open Portal Initiative with all major enterprise portal vendors, the Open CRM Partner Initiative, the Data Integration Initiative with major ETL players, and the Mobile BI Initiative.

Finally, increasingly recognized as the industry standard, Business Objects technology is being imbedded by more and more leading third party vendors such as Siebel and i2, ensuring deep integration with these applications.

With time the user population will grow. The BI solution will therefore need to seamlessly scale with increased usage. Business Objects is built on a distributed component architecture (CORBA). This means that as usage changes, load can be passed from one server to another or more servers can be added, without disrupting the system.

Enterprise BI systems are often mission critical, particularly when involving customer, partner, or supplier extranets. The BI solution must guarantee 100% availability. The Business Objects CORBA architecture enables failover, which means that if one server stops another will automatically take over. The Business Objects solution has been specifically designed for mission-critical applications. This is why Business Objects has more BI extranet customers than any other vendor.

In an enterprise setting, this information may come from a variety of sources. Business Objects positions itself as the "universal client," allowing users to easily access and combine data from multiple data sources including relational databases, OLAP servers, packaged applications (ERP, CRM, SCM), the web, OLTP systems, local data files such as Excel and XML, and so on. Possessing no database, data warehouse, or ETL tool of its own, Business Objects remains data store independent.

Users can easily combine data from multiple sources, for example comparing actuals from an Oracle database against budget from an Excel spreadsheet, at the report level. Business Objects does not require IT to build special multidimensional cubes or database schemas to make this possible.

Integration with existing security infrastructure is also important. Therefore, Business Objects works over firewalls, supports SSL, integrates with standard directories, can leverage NT login information, and so on.

Businesses can buy from a rapidly expanding suite of applications that lets them deploy best-practice analysis in the critical areas of customer, product and service intelligence, supply chain, and operations analysis. These modular applications provide predefined performance metrics and analytics that deliver immediate business value.

Additionally, companies can build a custom application based on the Business Objects BI platform. Both packaged and custom applications can leverage and communicate with each other as they plug into a common BI framework, contributing to an increasingly global enterprise view.

[1] "Information Access Tools Market Forecast and Analysis Summary, 2001-2005," IDC, May 2001.

[2] Howard Dresner, "BI: Making the Data Make Sense," Gartner, May 2001.

[3] For a general overview of the business intelligence industry please see: Bernard Liautaud with Mark Hammond, "e-Business Intelligence," McGraw-Hill, 2001.

[4] Idem.

[5] Philip Russom, "BI: An Imperative for e-Business," Hurwitz Group, 11 August 2000.

[6] Ted Kempf & Zipa Acosta, "BI: Integrators Prepare Your Solutions," Gartner, February 2001.

[7] Nigel Rayner, "Packaged BI Applications: Friends or Foes?" Gartner, May 2001.

[8] D. Vasset & H. Morris, "BI in the DB: Are Independent BI Suppliers Threatened?" IDC, April 2001.

[9] Howard Dresner, "BI: Making the Data Make Sense," Gartner, May 2001.

[10] "Coping With a Slowing Economy: Tactics of Seasoned CIOs in FS," AMR Research, 11 June 2001.

[11] Bernard Liautaud with Mark Hammond, "e-Business Intelligence," McGraw-Hill, 2001.

[12] Dave Folger, "BI Tools: Evaluation Criteria," Meta Group, 8 March 2001.

[13] Derek Slater, "The Whole is More Than its Parts," CIO Magazine, 15 May 2000.

[14] "Database Solutions IV," Survey.com, 2001.

[15] Nigel Rayner, "Packaged BI Applications: Friends or Foes?" Gartner, May 2001.

[16] Timothy Raab, "The Need for a BI Strategy...", DM Review, June 2000.

[17] "Information Access Tools Market Forecast and Analysis Summary, 2001-2005," IDC, May 2001.

[18] "CEO Growth 100," CEO Magazine, May 2001.

[19] Howard Dresner, "BI: Making the Data Make Sense," Gartner, May 2001.

[20] J. Sweeney-Coolidge, "DW and BI - Business Objects Delivers Expanded Mobile BI Capabilities," Hurwitz Group, 2 July 2001.

[21] Bernard Liautaud with Mark Hammond, "e-Business Intelligence," McGraw-Hill, 2001.

[22] Mark Ritacco, "The Business Value of BI", Business Objects, 2001.

[23] Richard Hackathorn, "BI for Intelligent Cost Structures," DM Review, June 2001.

[24] "Manufacturers are Thankful - or Wishful - for Applications That Help Them Respond," InformationWeek, February 2001.

[25] "MSDW CIO Survey Series: Release 2.1," MSDW, 6 March 2001.

[26] Mark Ritacco, "BI: Now More Than Ever," Business Objects, 2001.

[27] Nicolas Bontron, "The Decision Support TCO," Business Objects, 1998.

Karl Van den Bergh is the Product Marketing Manager for BusinessObjects(tm), having previously held marketing management and consultancy positions in the software industry for both American and French companies. He also possesses a technical background with a couple of years work as a software engineer. Karl is fluent in English, French, and Italian and holds a Bachelors in Physics from Trinity College, Dublin and a Masters in Computer Science from Imperial College, London.

The Business Objects product and technology are protected by US patent numbers 5,555,403 and 6,247,008. The Business Objects logo is a trademark of Business Objects S.A. in the United States and/or other countries. All other company, product, or brand names mentioned herein, may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Specifications subject to change without notice. Not responsible for errors or omissions. Copyright © 2001 Business Objects S.A. All rights reserved.