Jim Irving: A lot of people still think BI's only something really clever business analysts do on their desktops. But it has moved on from there. And that's why BI is a title that we're not that happy with, because our biggest customers are delivering value information to vast numbers of people.

Is it the web that has made this possible?

The web is a really good delivery mechanism internally. It has moved business intelligence gradually down the pyramid in the organisation and that is probably where most business intelligence vendors say the marketplace is. But where we are seeing our growth is among end-user organisations that have suddenly cottoned on to the fact that the web works for everybody - by the way, this applies to the public sector as well. Some of our customers are touching on a million users of business intelligence.

How can business intelligence add value?

Without any publicity, the New York City Department of Health gets four million hits a year because it has put its health inspection restaurant reports up online as an added-value service. You go in and you get a graphic of New York and the boroughs. You type in the restaurant name and it tells you online and in real time that it had 42 violations. Are you going to eat there? Now by word of mouth in New York people look up restaurants before they go out. They've actually changed the culture.

What about value to the business?

For about a decade the average compliance [with health laws] in New York had been about 20 percent. What happened to compliance when people stopped coming in through the door of your restaurant because your last report was bad? By the end of the first year it went to something like 70 percent. So, that also had a specific value for hospitals, for example, with fewer people with food poisoning, and for New York businesses with people taking less time off work. You can take any commercial company and say, "What would your customers like to know if it was so easy to get that they didn't have to do any work?"

That's an example of business intelligence working well, but what things go wrong?

People buy business intelligence on the front-end - the graphs and all the rest of it. And time after time we get people saying, "Yes, we bought a licence for 1,000 users but when we got to 150 it couldn't scale up any more and that was on four servers and now we're having to get eight servers." You want something that will seamlessly build and will operate across different platforms as well. When you start to say, "Right we're going to do it for the whole organisation," then it becomes probably the biggest issue.

What other things should IT teams think about when implementing BI systems?

Software consolidation is also very important. A common trend is people saying they've done a bit of analysis and they've got anything from three to 12 business intelligence and reporting environments. There is this whole concept of getting down from a sort of out-of-control departmental approach to actually physically trying to have a standard for the organisation. If you have too many systems, you've not only got the physical costs but you've got that fact that when you do want to get to some form of organisational analysis, these systems can't talk to each other very easily.

ABOUT JIM IRVING

Jim Irving is the managing director of business intelligence vendor Information Builders UK.

Irving has worked for the organisation since 2001.

He has over 25 years' experience within the IT industry, having previously been employed by Silicon Graphics, Sequent, Amdahl, Wang and British Olivetti.