Business intelligence—every organization wants it. But can every organization actually afford it? If our organization is thinking of a business intelligence environment that has been built specifically for a single company with highly visual and fancy teams and individual-based dashboards and KPIs, the answer is probably No, we can't afford it! The time and effort required to build such a custom solution is not cheap, and without clear focus and vision from the get-go, these kinds of projects can quickly get bogged down. For the majority of us, we need something cheaper and less expensive to maintain.

Let's not lose sight of what we're really after when we say our organization needs BI capabilities. Simply put, we need improved tools for finding, analyzing, and making sense of the mountain of data that we are storing on our servers and databases. As we improve our ability to store this data in Enterprise Resource Planning...