 Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the common data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) failure points, would spot the pattern: the hardest parts for most teams are understanding business issues and handling cross-organizational interactions.
Kimball University pushes for change
Historically, DW/BI projects were driven by visionary people who were conversant in both business and technology. They understood the potential of better business insight and were motivated to help the DW/BI team deliver on it. As DW/BI systems have become commonplace, teams are now often made up of more technically oriented people. To deliver better intelligence, BI and data warehousing teams need business acumen, interpersonal skills and communication competencies, according to a recent article of Kimball University. Gartner’s perspective
During last month’s Gartner BI Summit 2008 “The Next Generation of Innovation” in Chicago, the core message was also about creating a BI strategy that is focused on decision making being a core competency as opposed to just reporting measures. Today BI teams are very IT-centric and view their job as "let's get the data right and let's report to the right users at the right time." That is obviously essential, but Gartner considers that table stakes that everyone has to be good at that. “The organizations that take it up a notch, create a BI strategy that's less IT-centric, more business-centric and more focused on decision making itself”, so Gartner’s analyst Bill Hostmann said. Furthermore, “All sorts of anecdotal evidence suggests that there's 15 percent to 20 percent penetration among users and that's about it. We're reaching the people who are comfortable with Excel and grids, but we could be giving a lot more people the power to report on and analyze information and make better decisions. One way to do that is with some of the emerging technologies, particularly visualization, which have been proven to have mainstream appeal.” In articles on for example the Intelligent Business website (part of the Techweb network), Doug Henschen, Warren Thornthwaite and others, wrote articles to this effect too. Bizzscore: Business driven BI
Alwin Peppelenbosch, director of EFM Software, is very satisfied with this trend. “The recognition from so many technical BI specialists of the importance of business driven in stead of IT and database driven BI is ground breaking”, so he says. “With our performance management suite Bizzscore, we incorporated this business driven BI and optimal visualization to the max for years now. This means that it’s not even necessary for IT people to get more business knowledge as Kimball University suggests.” Alwin Peppelenbosch explains that this is because IT people are ‘forced’ to become more business-like by the way the solution operates and that the software is so user friendly that also non-IT people are able to implement and maintain Bizzscore. Best-of-Breed versus Mega Vendors?
Peppelenbosch is also content with the remarks that were made in the afore mentioned articles about the four largest BI vendors (IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft). For instance, Doug Henschen wrote: “A lot of the mega vendors are saying two different things. They're saying, "yeah, we're going to be open," but they are also saying "but we're going to be better together." You can't have it both ways. If they are hiding functionality or creating more proprietary APIs and not exposing that to third parties, that's going to be a problem. You want to be vigilant in your vendor selection in pushing for a world that is still very much best-of-breed where you can mix and match”. According to Peppelenbosch “This is a clear advice to look into Performance Management solutions like Bizzscore with more depth”. |
