While we were at Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user group conference) many companies stopped by to tell us about the challenge they are having in integrating sales data with other data for better business visibility. The real value of business analytics comes in combining data from multiple silos. This enables you to look across systems to get insight into customer profitability, sales productivity, quote-cash and other cross-functional but critical metrics. The visual below gives you an idea of how reporting tools that look across data sources can help you achieve your strategic goals.

Often, companies that don’t have significant BI staff get stuck either swimming in Excel or grappling with reporting tools that are more eye-candy than substance. This can be paralyzing as your business grows. Yet, if you have a small BI staff, you’re likely not ready to leap into a traditional BI solution. So, what are the reasonable demands you can make of a reporting tool without breaking the bank

• Support integrating data from multiple packaged applications, databases and files inside and outside the company.
• Support massive amounts of data from these multiple sources – even billions of rows.
• Support frequent updates from these multiple sources – not just weekly but daily.
• When employees leave a company, IT will turn off their access to internal applications. However, turning off access to critical SaaS applications can get overlooked.  Your reporting tools must support standards based SSO (Single Sign On) like SAML, since the reports contain key insight about your business – not just transactional data.
• Robust data visibility rules: When you combine data from multiple sources and try to provide access to hundreds and thousands of users, who sees what data becomes important.  For example, you may not want to give access to the latest sales data to all managers.  Users should all be able to run the same report, but see only their data. This is critical for providing end-user self-service and unburdening IT.

Bottom line, as you are thinking of reporting and analysis tool, you should be thinking of the integration capabilities. Integrating your data from across company silos and applications is critical. And controlling the access to, and security of, that data is non-negotiable. What happens when you don’t – check out this aticle (click this link) that describes the experience of one mid-market business who underestimated the challenge of integration.