The question this week in eBizq was around the consideration of business intelligence within the context of enterprise architecture. Is it there? Should it be?
Truth-be-told most of those doing enterprise architecture consider architecture as the plan, and business intelligence as "just an application." They know it's there, but don't consider how it exists and leverages architecture. Therefore, business intelligence has a tendency to be an afterthought, and thus why business intelligence is not as effective as it should be in many cases.
The fact is that business intelligence requires a lot of architectural planning to get right. You need to consider how the information in the operational data stores will be aggregated, replicated, or abstracted, or all of the above. Thus, you need to consider data integration patterns, including latency and logging. Also, you need to consider data governance which should be dealt with at a systemic level within the architecture.
Having said that, I don't think that business intelligence systems are a consideration as part of architecture, typically high up on the architectural diagrams, with the applications, without consideration around how the information is gathered and placed into a meaningful state. Thus, the business intelligence guys are forced to create links into the data that look like...well...like they lack architecture and planning.
The fact is that architecture is about considering all systems that leverage the resources of that architecture, including business intelligence, and making sure that the needs of those systems are considered within the architecture. Many consider architecture as something that can be thought of as separate from the systems that will rely on that architecture, but doing that only leads to more ad-hoc development such as data pipes going everywhere, and systems that are operating less than optimal.
Get a clue, and make sure business intelligence is a core part of your architectural planning.
David -
Couldn't agree more with your assessment. However, one other item to note is that there are not many robust architecture tools to enable architecture to emerge as there are in the application development space (Rational, etc). We at Balanced Insight have taken on that challenge in creating our product Consensus to enable architects to abstract the true architecture for their BI solution out of the proprietary stack and maintain a repository of reusable designs across popular BI platforms.
Thanks for the blog post and keep pushing that envelop.
Regards -
Tom Hammergren
Balanced Insight, Inc.
http://www.balancedinsight.com
David -
For many in the BI world, architecture = enterprise data warehouse.
Unfortunately, the world isn't that simple and business cannot just wait for classic ETL/DW development cycles.
The proliferation of data warehouse appliances is one architecture alternative (even more silos!) that seems a reaction to high costs and the need to do something about architecture.
Better would be more top down, integrated thinking and tools that abstract and virtualize complex data architectures.
-bob
Leveraging all of a business' resources is probably one of the top reasons why business intelligence has such a strong ROI. There is so much untapped information that it just makes sense to make new discoveries through this technology.