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Why Does Enterprise Business Intelligence Fall Short?

Conceptually BI sounds fabulous, but we all agree it has not been successful so far. One of the reason I see is that, BI makes business users "depend" on IT for getting a new dashboard, for example. Requirements comes to IT while they are "hot", by the time IT delivers them back to business, enthusiasm fades and they don't get used as frequently as they originally thought.

I've been thinking about this lately and a solution to this is "Enterprise Data Mashups". Philosophical difference between BI and EDM is while BI makes users depend on IT, EDM empowers them with right tools. Enterprise widgets are the heart of EDM, that are developed by IT. Business users put the widgets together themselves ad-hoc and get the desired results.

There are a bunch of open source mashup servers available out there in addition to proprietary ones from software stalwarts such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Enterprise Data Mashups look promising to me but, let time decide :)

Qlik View and business intelligence developer | qalikview applications and business intelligence at
http://www.bintelligence.altervista.org/

My personal thoughts on BI is that it is often misused. I mean, someone in the business says they need a report, and then someone in BI says, "what do you want the report to look like?" or "what data do you want on your report?" or any number of other questions regarding the nature and purpose of the report with the intent of giving the business what they are asking for. This would seem like a logical approach. However, in my experience, more often than not, the business is asking for something they don't need in the first place. Meaning, we climb the ladder and get to the top only to realize the ladder was on the wrong wall. More often than not, my experience has been, that reports are used to facilitate a specific business process. They are often an intermediary step between one process and another. And I would argue an unnecessary step.

For example, and this is an overly simplistic example for illustration purposes. A business runs a report that provides inventory information for a given set of products. The user of this report takes that information and decides which products to reorder or not reorder, etc. But why do we need to create a report in the first place to facilitate this process? We could quite easily create a system process that analyzes the data in real time and sends out "alerts" or "tasks" to the appropriate individuals who can then take appropriate action (workflow) in real-time or the system creates and sends an electronic order (biztalk) for the given products whose inventory falls below a certain level.

This is a different way of thinking about technology and the role technology plays in an IT organization. I worked for an online education company a few years ago, in speaking to one of the executives I said something to the order of "this is a software company"... I was immediately corrected. I was informed that "this is an education company".  While from his perspective he may have been correct, to this day I believe he was mistaken. So, one of the issues with BI is that are we eager to give the business what they want or what they need? Are we willing to educate them on different solutions that would in the end make the need for certain analytics unnecessary? Many of your suggestions will help with this... Such as "So from day one your Business Intelligence strategy needs to be  at the forefront of your engineering design." If this is done, it can be determined from the outset what analytics are truly necessary and which are unnecessarily used for business process. Also your point - "all of this is symptomatic of a Business Intelligence strategy that doesn’t provide the users with what they need, a self service method of accessing the available data and reporting on it. You need to develop a strategy to implement this, because the chances are that your Business Intelligence team is not the ‘business experts’. The kid down in Finance is. Provide him the data and the tools and let him loose." Providing a platform where capable business users can mine their own data, allowing the business to get the information they need, when they need it, without having to go through the ceremony of an IT development request is one of the most powerful things IT can do for the business.

Your role as a leader of development and BI you are the gateway to how each is leveraged to provide business value. And given your solid understanding of the business, deep technical expertise, and the excellent relationship you have with your colleagues, you are in an excellent position to do this extremely well.

what a great info, thanks.