Computerworld -
For a hot technology, business intelligence is mighty long in the tooth. BI has been around in one form or another, with one name or another, for decades. In all that time, it has never lived up to its potential, but business leaders aren't ready to give up on it. The critical question is, Can IT respond to the challenge this time?
IT had its chance to be the BI provider in the 1980s and 1990s and blew it by failing to address the BI challenge as anything more than a technical one. The last decade saw the business units try to take on BI without IT support, with only limited success.
The technical challenge of BI becomes less daunting all the time. Analytical software has improved tremendously, and there have been significant improvements in the hardware and software for managing large amounts of data -- which is good, since vast quantities of data are essential to business intelligence.
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Computerworld - For a hot technology, business intelligence is mighty long in the tooth. BI has been around in one form or another, with one name or another, for decades. In all that time, it has never lived up to its potential, but business leaders aren't ready to give up on it. The critical question is, Can IT respond to the challenge this time?
IT had its chance to be the BI provider in the 1980s and 1990s and blew it by failing to address the BI challenge as anything more than a technical one. The last decade saw the business units try to take on BI without IT support, with only limited success.
The technical challenge of BI becomes less daunting all the time. Analytical software has improved tremendously, and there have been significant improvements in the hardware and software for managing large amounts of data -- which is good, since vast quantities of data are essential to business intelligence.
The problem is that many enterprises that have spent seven figures and more for BI tools, databases, data warehouses and extraction software have ended up with little to show for their investments besides some colorful but essentially worthless charts showing quarterly sales sorted in multiple ways. What the business wants is detailed analysis and predictions of future performance. What does IT need to do differently to give the business what it wants from BI?
IT needs to face two BI challenges. The first challenge is rather simple, while the second is complex and, for IT, more than a little frightening.
The simple challenge is to put the company's highly sophisticated BI tools in the hands of someone who truly understands what they can do. Look at it this way: Now that the company has bought a thoroughbred, it needs to hire a jockey. No more corralling a recent marketing grad to run BI, or telling an aging programmer to take on the task. Real expertise in business statistics is a must. For most IT shops, that means hiring from outside the organization.
The complex challenge goes to the heart of a very difficult subject: risk.
All over the world, IT pros fear risk, randomness and chance. We have always sought to drive them out of our systems and processes. And this is why IT might chafe some when it comes up against BI. The business leaders want BI to give them predictions of future performance and trends, and you just can't get into predicting what the future holds without confronting risk. (I'm using the term "risk" interchangeably with "uncertainty," meaning that a situation's outcome, whether positive or negative, is unknown.)
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