In today's organizations, business intelligence initiatives have become one of the top technology spending priorities. Why? Because BI projects:

• Leverage existing information investments
  
• Are relatively low cost and low risk
  
• Deliver proven high return on investment (ROI)
  

Because of the relatively low cost of entry and high ROI, the BI market continues to show continued strong growth. In turn, this means that most large organizations are in the process of initiating new BI projects.

However, despite their enthusiasm, few organizations today have a comprehensive enterprise BI strategy or clearly defined BI standards. As projects continue to proliferate, they face a growing patchwork of disparate BI technologies, and the consequences become increasingly visible. Challenges include:

• Rising redundant costs in deployment, maintenance, and training
  
• Increased information inconsistencies
  
• Frustrated end users who cannot get timely answers to their business questions
  

By reducing the number of BI standards in your organization, you can achieve significant cost savings, greater control over information, and better alignment with your business users. An enterprise BI solution helps you implement cohesive BI standards that lead to increased competitive advantage. Implementing such BI standards requires a pragmatic, phased approach that takes into account the organizational realities of large organizations, and the business value of your existing BI applications.

This paper gives an overview of the advantages of implementing business intelligence (BI) standards. Learn how successful organizations have standardized on, and benefited from BI solutions from SAP - and why you should join them.