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He believes the choice comes back to the company`s strategic intent.

"It is always important to remember that the tool chosen needs to dynamically meet all the company`s key performance indicators (KPI)," he urges. "Since KPIs change over time as the needs of the business and the business itself changes, a BI application will, therefore, have to dynamically adapt as required."

Harvey Jones Systems` MD Keith Jones says: "The tools a company selects will be determined by the current technical environment of the long-term vision for the solution."

He advises that a foundation must be laid now to build the full enterprise solution over the next three to five years.

POINT-TO-POINT VS INDUSTRY-WIDE

Caron Mooney, director of IS Partners, suggests that the company starts with one small increment and delivers new ones in short intervals, within a quarter. The second one has to be built on the first one like building blocks, and they must not be silos. "I`m talking about small implementations that wear the hat of the enterprise all the way through. Move quickly so that ROI can be realised quickly."

Mooney says that often companies sit with tools they may not need, and she believes competency of users is paramount in the selection process. "Avoid buying the cheapest tools," she says, "Sometimes cheap tools cost more to develop and adjust to existing infrastructures."

Andrew Connold, MD at Synergy Computing, suggests: "First look at what is happening in the business. Start off with the area that is giving you the most pain."

It is often beneficial to deploy a point-solution in this case, he says, and suggests a company goes for the quick-win solution in order to move forward quickly.

EXTRACT, TRANSFORM, LOAD

Martin Rennhackkamp, strategic information director at the PBT Group, suggests to companies that an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool forms an essential part of their BI solution.

"ETL is the plumbing behind BI," he says. "It is essential to the BI structure."

He believes that ETL will become a commodity and says that many vendors are already moving into that space.

"Realtime ETL is the next buzz," he says. "It is the hidden enabler."

MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT

According to Intellient BI manager Yolanda Komen, a metadata management and master data management (MDM) tool is essential to any BI solution.

"Data quality, metadata management and master data management are all becoming more important as part of the overall solution," she says.

She also believes that BI is moving towards business process management (BPM) and local organisations are starting the see the benefits of having a single, integrated solution.

Informatica GM Paul van Aswegen adds to that by saying: "MDM may well close the loop in enterprise data management, but without reliable, clean data, no amount of process will deliver the business value sought through an MDM initiative. Data quality and effective data integration are critical elements of MDM and yet are often trivialised or overlooked."