Corporate BI Tools Standardization: Trends and Directions

by Curt Hall

There has been a lot of talk at conferences as well as in the IT press and from the vendors themselves about how organizations should standardize on their business intelligence (BI) tools platforms (query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards, etc.). In July 2005, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 111 end-user organizations about their efforts to consolidate and standardize their BI tools platforms. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are undertaking BI tools standardization initiatives. In particular, the survey was designed to identify the issues and trends being encountered in these efforts, discern how companies are progressing with their initiatives, and provide statistics useful for benchmarking and measuring your own organization's BI tools standardization efforts.