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My company uses Cognos for BI and Reporting. It is VERY expensive to use and maintain. Each user license costs about $1000. In our staff of 5 IT people, 2 are dedicated exclusively to maintaining and configuring Cognos, and they are expensive. I stumbled across a product called Pentaho that sounds like it does much of the same things, but it is free. The developer charges for maintenance and customization of features. It is a java based app that runs on a JBoss Application Server...I think. I'm baffled by all the acronyms. It is all new to me. I'm trying to find a way to help save some money if possible, but I don't want to be the person that gets fingered with configuring and maintaining this software.
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z, a company with an IT staff of 5 people has NO business getting into "BI". Seriously. Unless there's some corporate structure, like you're somehow in charge of a hundred other little companies. Sounds like someone bought a pig in a poke, and didn't realize they needed to hire pig herders.
How many transactions do you have a day ? How much data do you actually have to 'mine' for 'intelligence' ?
The problem with BI products is that unless you spend time asking them the right questions, you're better off not having them. Sure, you can get pretty pictures and the oh so MBA-exciting "cockpit" or "Dashboard" display that makes some executive think he's in charge of your company like he's in charge of his Hummer, but it's probably crap information.
I actually work with a BI product every day- in fact I'm out of town for a class in it right now. But I work for a $2B + corporation, and we ride herd on more than ten thousand transactions a day, so Excel wasn't cutting it for analytic purposes. And there are two of us managing and creating all the BI stuff, but over 70 of us in the "IT" environment. And just about over 10K employees worldwide.
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we have about 800 employees at 7 sites in US and Mexico. I agree with everything that you say 100%, but my opinion counts for zilch. I spend my days writing Crystal Reports to extract data from our ERP software. Cognos was supposed to help limit the amount of time that I'm spending on that, but it has actually caused it to go up. The managers don't want to take the time to learn how to use the Cognos sofware, so they ask to have accounts set up for their underlings at $1000 each.
I am personally maintaining about 130 computers at two sites in Washington state. I'm the resident ERP 'expert' because I'm the only one who hasn't been fired or quit yet. Understaffed doesn't even begin to describe the situation.
