New Frontiers in Business Intelligence

"We make heavy use of our Data ETL Tools, the State of the Art Data Warehousing Solutions and we drive many of the Strategies and Tactics of the Company" is the refrain you hear from users of Business Intelligence in many Fortune 500 companies where IT is mature.

That may be true with many companies. Bur scratch the surface and you will find a lot of horror stories and ad-hoc Skunk Works projects that make more use of Excel Spreadsheets than any BI solution!

This is the gap between the theory and practice of BI today in many enterprises. In many cases, it is because the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence efforts do not take into view ALL of the business users's needs and come up with a solution that satisfies all.

This is not to say that such a single BI solution that satisfies all of the Business Users in the company exists and it's only the choice of the tool that went awry!  The truth is that many of these solutions in the different areas of Business Intelligence, Sales Intelligence, Financial Intelligence and Process or Operational Intelligence are all evolving, as we speak, based on the unique needs of the different Business Users!

Meanwhile, Business Users have gone on with their own home grown Excel-Macro based solutions, for their own specific purposes.

Of course, there are some software packages like Navision Accounting (Now a Microsoft Product since they bought them some years ago) are designed from ground up to be very spreadsheet- friendly to put in data or extract data from! These get much more traction than other software packages. They may not be suitable for Medium or Large Organizations, but there are approaches that seem to balance the needs of end users and the need for IT to achieve some semblance of standardization of data, tools and approaches without proliferating the company with many end-point, best-of-breed products!

It is not an easy problem currently, but who said Business Intelligence comes neatly packaged and simple to do?

 It is wiser to find out than to suppose - Mark Twain