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Every enterprise, including small and medium sized companies, understands the value of business intelligence. True business intelligence can help an organization to acquire and retain customers, plan for new product and service initiatives, fix appropriate price points, integrate social media marketing campaigns with other marketing channels, understand and address the competition, budget and forecast for financial success and much more!However, the value of Business Intelligence can sometimes be lost in discussions about the cost of a BI solution, the resources needed to manage the system and the length of time it takes to implement and train users and to achieve ROI. In today’s new technology landscape, these issues are easy to address. If an enterprise takes the time to document and detail its requirements and to select an appropriate system, it can reap the benefits of business intelligence without breaking the bank and with relative ease and definitive success.

Traditional business intelligence tools and corporate performance management solutions typically use an IO-based processing technique that makes the compilation and analysis of data a slow process. It limits processing and speed from hardware resources that use extensive IO to read and write to and from the disk. This challenge can be frustrating for users and for IT staff because it reduces productivity and can overwhelm systems during peak periods.

BI solutions that utilize InMemory Computing are able to load data into memory, and because the process of memory read/write is very efficient and fast as compared to IO-based processing technique, it provides superior performance. However, InMemory Computing requires a lot of memory to serve large data sets and a large user base, and that is an expensive hardware proposition.

In our previous article, entitled ‘The Provocative Possibilities of Combining Business Intelligence and Social Media’, we talked in generalities about the opportunities of combining BI with Social Media to better leverage the potential of social media networks and internet marketing and to accurately measure the success of these programs and plan for the future.

Social media is a critical component of market success in today’s interactive culture and economy. With an ever increasing user base and ever expanding social media platforms, the focus on marketing, advertising and product and market analysis must include internet marketing, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and social network marketing. Customer and prospects are focused on various personal, consumers, community and business topics and they find, share and express this focus using social media.

There are many other factors a business must consider when it elects to acquire or change reporting packages. In this article, we will focus on three of the most common problems a business faces in compiling, displaying and analyzing information to gain true business intelligence and create useful, clear reports and presentations.

The problem with cookie cutter solutions is that every business has different requirements and reporting and business intelligence needs are as unique as each business and each employee within that business.