Leveraging Information and Intelligence

I had some good reaction from my posting last week, where I asked the question:  "Is Business Intelligence part of Enterprise Architecture?"  Who would have thought that so many understand the links between architecture, and a well defined BI strategy?        

Some of the feedback included:

"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). "...

Tom Hammergren

"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."...

Bob Eve

The Twitter responses were even better, check them out here.  

The core issue is one of understanding and lack of architectural forethought really.    Those who define BI for the enterprise typically work around tactical needs.   Somebody asks for a report, they provide the report.   Somebody asks for another report, they change the technology to something cooler, and provide the report.  No concept of a larger strategy and clearly no concept of architecture.   

The fix here is one of leadership within the enterprise and getting the many BI projects on one strategic plane.   I've been fighting that battle for 20 years now, and it's also difficult to get those in the weeds to look up now and again and take note of the overall issues of the business, and not some tactical requirement.

The end result of having a tactical focus on BI solutions is that they layer on each other over the years, creating a complex and dysfunctional architecture by default.     Something that will have to be fixed in the future, but hopefully it will be after you retire.

The core message here is that BI is strategic, and thus needs to be part of the overall IT strategy.   Although many agree with me, I suspect that this will be a problem for a long time to come.