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This month saw AccountingWeb's second on Great Debate, with the house arguing that Business Intelligence is inappropriate for most UK businesses.

Our very own technology and IT editor John Stokdyk kicked off as first proposer, taking the general viewpoint that Business Intelligence - and even IT in general - has delivered dubious competitive advantages to corporates, let alone the SME sector. In an industry that has suffered from an overload of buzzwords, is BI just another case of promotional smoke and mirrors, he asked? Even if it wasn't, the attendant skills gap between the IT proficiency needed to make BI work and the IT resources of the average SME doomed it to failure.

Will Parker, sales director as accountsIQ, took to the stump as first opposer. It was common sense, he argued, that all business was essentially about making good decisions, and good decisions required good information. Yet the data from which much SME information was derived - such as most small company accounting systems- was pointless for such a purpose. He acknowledge their had been much IT hyperbole over BI in the past, but there was real value to be had now. The sophistication barrier was now little more than a market perception , given the rolling border of IT change had progressed into the culture. Neither was BI particularly expensive anymore.

Seconding John Stokdyk, Nigel Rayner, research vice-president at Gartner, said BI was not sufficiently embedded in existing SME software applications to be useful. It had yet to move away from its IT-led heritage and satisfy genuine client needs. Furthermore, utilising BI often involved changing the SME's pre-existing business processes.

The last of our guest speakers, Tony Crowhurst, product manager at Microsoft, finished by defending BI's potential for SMEs. The term Business Intelligence has, after all, been around for 20 years. Mere buzzwords come and go in a lot less than half that time. With the advent of Web 2.0 and cheaper and more popular CRM software, embedding would proves less of a problem as systems were converging in the cloud anyway. The real barrier was just user education, ant that, as well as sitting outside of BI, would be over come eventually.

This month's Great Debate subsequently received two official submissions from members who wished to have their say. They are:

Gary Boddington, managing director, Alchemex
Simple and affordable SME Business Intelligence is a reality

The traditional BI environment has become bogged down with high-ticket prices, delayed deployments, failed integrations and slow response to BI requests, and frankly has lacked any real new innovative ideas for a long time. This poor reputation has preceded the BI industry's advance into the small and mid size business sector which now has a vast population of sceptics and non believers who expound the "BI as an oxymoron" argument whenever they are confronted by BI vendors. The industry needs some fresh new angles and there are a number of smaller niche players that are forging the way ahead and disrupting the staid old business models of the big guns that have traditionally dominated this space, threatening to bring fundamental change to the industry. It's true, Business Intelligence can be simple, affordable and more importantly, relevant, for the mid size market - because that is what they want.

I have to agree that the biggest problem with BI vendors has been the BI vendors themselves and their collective inaudibility to hear the market demands of an emergent client profile that differs to what had become accustomed and lives in a different market altogether. An outdated view is that that the end user in this new target market is simply too unsophisticated to understand the multitude of multi-letter acronyms required to successfully conclude a system integration, and therefore should be ignored because they simply never have, and never will grasp the concepts. Traditional BI vendors continue to apply big ticket thinking to small ticket business - high volume and low margin being a largely foreign concept to their traditional business models. They also continue to apply complex solution stacks to very simple business requirements because they carry the burden of expensive consultants who only know time and billing principles learnt in the corporate sector. This lack of empathy with the business requirements, and inability to offer price points more applicable to the SME budget, is not sustainable and change is imminent.

Of course the reality is that mid-sized businesses are not stupid, they see the benefit of BI in driving the basis of very good decisions in their business, but it's also a fact that they either are tired of listening to high end consultants trying to sell them over baked solutions, or worse still, suffering the at the hands of their end users not realising any value from a failed implementation that offered peaches and delivered peanuts. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that mid size entities simply don't have the resources to research, purchase and adopt new technology as say, their corporate counterparts would have. Regardless, I find the inception, and exponential growth, of the CRM industry as analogous to the current situation of the BI industry. It was not much more than 10 years ago that CRM was a new three letter acronym that businesses of all sizes were grappling to understand, but now even the smallest of home office users is exploring the use of some or other form of CRM software to professionally manage their relationship with their client base. Similarly, my view is that it would take a brave punter to bet against BI becoming a norm in business society regardless of the size of the organisation, and this is what is quietly driving the creation of new and exciting markets.

The next generation of BI companies can embrace these markets and are making huge strides in delivering real time, simple and affordable BI, armed with simple pre-packaged reporting solutions, targeted at frustrated end users and which carry ticket prices driven by realistic customer focused pricing policies. They have identified the market, understand the solution requirements implicitly and have cutting edge solutions built on a new Web 2.0 wave, amongst others, ushering in the future of Software as a Service and the powerful reach and frictionless deployment possibilities that this represents in the mid size BI space. Their pioneering solutions have a far better probability of succeeding in this space and their edge is simply in having grown up with SME "thinking" - it's in their blood.

They are more nimble to accurately respond to market demands in this space and go back to the basics. They use Excel as a major "ice breaker" as it immediately looks familiar to the SME business but they can also deliver rapid and significant, solution driven, returns on investment. Evidence is apparent in successful symbiotic relationships that exist between, for example a successful Accounting software vendor and a mid-sized focused niche BI player. On the one hand a vendor that understands accounting for SME's but doesn't understand how to truly create BI value for their end users, and on the other hand a BI vendor that has a demonstrable pedigree in SME market and which offers a solution that adds immeasurable value to business partners and clients of the accounting vendor and drives BI growth into the customer base. This is a real and tangible example of a winning SME BI strategy model.

Untold opportunity is rife in the SME BI space globally and the big guys will do well to integrate their traditional models into this space. Potentially they might just carry too much baggage to wade down into this space successfully and might not find the returns as attractive as they have been accustomed to in the past. The end user must start to look past the regular suspects and seek out a vendor that might not have the same history or reputation as those that have gone before, but they certainly know the market. The future is here and it belongs to those BI vendors that are first to bring disruptive, unique and refreshing change to the BI environment - these vendors are in our midst today.

Steve Butcher, director, Azura Associates
SMEs can't afford to ignore Business Intelligence

Obviously the definition of "small business" has to be clarified but for the majority of SMEs, even at the lower end of the scale, I have to oppose the motion in the strongest possible terms. Indeed I would contend that BI will increasingly become a vital factor in developing and maintaining successful operations.

Nigel Rayner is undoubtedly right when he says that the "major challenge now is that not enough business people understand what the technology can do", but surely this is a challenge that we need to rise to. We will be doing nothing to support this important sector of the UK economy by withdrawing when what is really needed is more education, creating a greater awareness of the value of BI. Business Intelligence should be of benefit to everyone but the smallest business.

What is there to justify this statement? Firstly the cost of BI continues to fall thereby making it more accessible for smaller businesses. Excel can be used now to provide a powerful front end to access OLAP cubes and the tools become increasingly easier to apply, speeding development and hence reducing the cost of development.

Secondly the enhanced information, both in terms of quality and speed, enabling business decisions to made according to facts and not gut feeling, delivers an advantage of overwhelming proportions. How else for instance do they quickly identify something as fundamental as customer profitability?

It is true that more and more applications will deliver embedded BI functionality but it must be remembered that this will be limited to the data resident in these systems which might be restrictive. However, providing that standard technologies are used, and the development is open, it will be possible to join these up with other data sources to provide a view of the whole organisation.

Many SMEs spend significant sums in pulling together, and presenting, information. The provision of Self Service Information on BI platform in these organisations makes for very sound investment propositions. It could also be argued that Professional Advisors have a responsibility to advise and educate their client groups, and maybe even provide hosted systems to support them.

The use Business Intelligence has grown significantly in large organisations over the last decade and it now should follow in the SME sector. It will not be long before BI will be important in order to compete, but for the moment its deployment will still deliver competitive advantage. Surely this is not something that any aspiring SME would want to ignore.

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