The Business Intelligence Ball Game. It's the Major Leagues and, lately, there's no doubt you're playing hardball. The competition to be the fastest and the best at delivering meaningful, timely insights to customers...that's what makes for a winning team. A little slip-up in your batting average and it's back to the dugout.

Where to turn for the winning edge? No, steroids are definitely not advised. There are a lot of tools out there that claim they can help you deliver insights better, faster and cheaper than ever before. More often than not, these tools count on the top hitters on your team and your IT group to define what represents best-in-class and push it out across the organization.

So what's wrong with that?
Two things:

• Problem 1 - With these other, one-off solutions, the most productive members of your team are burdened with the added responsibility of learning new technologies...third party charting components...data-scripting... even the design of web-reporting portals. This takes your MVP out of the game during the learning curve and whenever shifting business needs dictate the reworking of content.
  
  
• Problem 2 - Many of these tools require IT involvement at every turn...from system implementation to report/presentation development and distribution. Let's face it -- we all need IT, but at the end of the day they have other issues to deal with, besides developing reports and situational selling decks that sales, marketing and category managers are better equipped to handle themselves. They also tend to approach problems with a one-size-fits all approach, and that's not real-world.

IT should have responsibility for selecting and implementing many of the aspects of a Business Intelligence solution, but business users tend to have a pretty good idea of what they need to be in control without always relying on IT.

You can control your destiny!
In order to build a winning team, you need all your players making a solid contribution. Empowering individuals with tools they can quickly learn and understand gives you a decided edge.

Interactive Edge's XP3 is a powerful, robust solution in a friendly, flexible, Microsoft Office environment, right out of the box. In fact, all charting and graphing is accomplished using real Excel charts. The difference is that XP3 empowers the business user to tie this standard content into an Enterprise Data Warehouse or Analysis Server. That means, not only are business-users empowered, but they're able to distribute what they produce to strengthen the entire team.

Don't have a data warehouse? No problem - with XP3 you can build your own, with or without IT involvement, even on your laptop!

Interactive Edge recognizes that there are some A Players that can offer best in class content up to the organization. That being the case, XP3 makes it simple for team members to author and distribute this content across the enterprise. Where XP3 differs from other solutions is in that it also gives distributed personnel the tools to quickly and easily modify pre-defined content in a familiar Office environment and take the data they need on the road.

XP3 is also IT friendly! Because it works within the context of a standard Microsoft environment and can tie into any existing data warehouse without duplicating the data, there is no custom implementation required and security is never an issue.

The one problem IT has with XP3? Well, they might get bored since the business users can create and update their own content instead of involving them at every turn. IT may just have to spend more time on other projects, like figuring out how to keep track all the new sales you're making! In fact, with many clients, the IT group has become the biggest champion of XP3.