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Saturday, August 13, 2011

Business Intelligence Total Cost of Ownership

Mark Montgomery points me to a post on Boris Evelson's blog on Forrester's site regarding the total cost of BI ownership.   Some very good comment interaction including some thoughts by Mark:

" ... Let's not forget that buyer beware rules in BI just as it does in most markets, and therefore customer sophistication and internal experience/talent/knowledge is likely the most determining factor (if you don't see a fool sitting around the table.... look in a mirror--that includes enterprise software architects by the way). It's also impossible to relate consulting services to software price tag without drilling down on data silos and integration costs -- still a huge variant there as evidenced by the U.S. Army SAP project among others.

As demand partially suggests (sales tactics notwithstanding), there is a lot of value in technologies related to BI, and as we see in the vendor list mentioned above quite a lot of differentiation in how to structure, collect, analyze, and present data for decision making. In the vast majority of cases I've studied, particularly in crisis prevention, it only requires one accurate decision to pay for the entire investment many times over -- it would be irresponsible to forget that rather dominant fact ... "

I hope this draws you to the blog and conversation.   TCO in the BI world is important.  I wrestled with it in the enterprise where we tended to be lax about what was 'allowed' and thus overpaid more than we thought. 

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