To be able to cope with the challenges of change and to do their job properly, staff require instant, intuitive access to information:

• They need to be able to explore data in the way they want without the need to understand complex underlying technology or having to refer to the IT department.

• They require a comprehensive reporting and interrogation tool that provides relevant common routines as well as the ability to build ad-hoc reports.

• They need to be able to do all these things without re-course to the sophisticated data integration required to extract meaningful data from the data sources in an organisation.

Many tools profess to offer Business Intelligence capability and experience shows that these tools are either to costly and over specified as enterprise-wide solutions or are little more than a software development kit for data integration.

Both these types of solutions fail to meet the needs of executives, managers and administrators for intuitive access and analysis of data.