The convergence of enterprise reporting with sophisticated analytics in the form of enterprise usiness intelligence has made it not just possible but necessary to exploit information as a strategic asset. Achieving that convergence represents an extreme cost advantage for organizations. Reducing the number of vendors’ tools will reduce software licensing and maintenance costs as well as hardware, support, and training costs. A strategy to standardize
for informational consistency and organizational governance and compliance, coupled with the goal of tool consolidation to dramatically reduce IT operating costs, has become today’s corporate mandate.

This paper builds on that mandate by providing the specific business and architectural success factors to consider when selecting one Enterprise Business Intelligence Suite (EBIS) to serve as the enterprise standard. Too often organizations select a standard BI technology on the basis of the success they have had with a departmental solution already in place. This paper provides a more objective and ultimately safer set of criteria.