My two-part article on on-demand BI:

Part 1 – Can on-demand business intelligence break down pervasive BI barriers?

The desire of business users for information that can help them to better reach customers and improve business operations and corporate profitability far outstrips what many IT departments have been able to supply. And as IT struggles to create reporting and analytics systems that can make sense of existing data, the never-ending data deluge from inside and outside the corporate walls is only widening the information gap.

Part 2 – How to overcome the downsides of on-demand and SaaS BI software

As we discussed in the first part of this article, on-demand business intelligence (BI) software can be less expensive, faster to deploy and easier to use than traditional on-premise BI tools are. That is the optimist’s view of on-demand BI; but what about the glass-is-half-empty side of things?

The fact is that the typical enterprise needs to overcome several roadblocks before leveraging on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS) BI technology. For starters, companies often are looking to reduce the number of BI tools they’re using, not add more.