Not having a single version of the truth for business intelligence data used for reporting—such as data about customers, products, channel partners, suppliers, and employees—slows analysis, delays action, and impedes your ability to improve business performance.

1. Why' Reporting Alone Isn't a Strong Enough Business Intelligence Strategy
Not having a single version of the truth for business intelligence data used for reporting—such as data
about customers, products, channel partners, suppliers, and employees—slows analysis, delays action,
and impedes your ability to improve business performance.
Application leaders in midmarket organizations using an IT-centric reporting approach to BI can slow the
discovery of insights that impact an organization's ability to remain competitive. Data-discovery tools
make it easier for business users to understand "why" business events happen.
Key Challenges
•Decisions based only on descriptive reports don't explain why a business event happens.
•Midmarket reports make more information available to users, but limit the types of analysis users can
do and insights they can derive from the data.
•Midmarket organizations think that smaller business intelligence (BI) budgets prevent them from
performing more-advanced analytics.
•Budgeting pressures, coupled with historical precedence, make the IT-centric approach to BI seem like
a good way to cut costs, but, ultimately, can lead to lost technology investments
Recommendations
•Move beyond just using descriptive reporting to asking why business events happen by advancing BI
maturity.
•Turn discoveries about why business events happen into actions that impact business processes.
•Combine data-discovery style BI tools with other analytic technologies to stave off competitors by
answering more advanced questions like what will and what should happen.
•Calculate ROI on data-discovery-style BI tools using a cost-benefit analysis.
Source: Gartner