Business Intelligence: Then and Now

Bangalore: The IT industry is slowly losing its control over BI as more and more business users are taking control over BI applications, tools and platforms. Many organizations are using Business Intelligence to help them make better and quicker decisions. Forrester, a technology and marketing research company advised the business and IT professionals to understand and adapt the latest trends in BI.

In the past, only a handful of organizations were able to afford adopting a BI solution as most of the tools available were either too complex or too expensive. Although, they were used for almost everything depending on their capacity, they were not advanced. Designers incorporated all the tools in one package which actually made it costly and BI was affordable only for big organizations. This ‘big’ packaged tool did not last for a long time. As technology advanced, BI vendors started opening up this ‘big’ package and selling the tools individually based on their functions and the need of the customers.  This eventually brought down the cost of the tool and it was affordable not only for the big organizations but also for the smaller ones.

In the past only big business organizations could afford in-house computer programmers who were trained in the development and administration of the tools. However, when the ‘big’ packaged tool was broken down into individual tools, smaller companies were able to hire computer programmers.
BI tools are now available for rent and professionals can be hired on contractual basis depending on the need of the company. This has reduced the cost of maintaining a full time BI professional apart from reducing the maintenance cost of the tools.

The current century has seen the popularity of ‘Outsourcing’.  BI is outsourced to Business Process Outsourcing companies in various parts of the world where labor cost is relatively cheap. This proves to be profitable to the company which outsources its Business Intelligence.

Business Intelligence has developed by leaps and bounds and its tools have become cheap and affordable to everyone.