How timely and how relevant to Business Intelligence these observations are! Many enterprises spend millions of dollars building huge datawarehouses and constantly spend time and effort, cleaning up data, or battle with problems of extract, transform and load.
Ask the users, whether these are ultimately useful, 5 out of 10 times you will hear the answer " Sort-of" or "Not Quite".
Meanwhile, they have been loading up only the data they want in Excel spreadsheets and doing their own Business Intelligence efforts!
This is exactly feeding the problem with lots of money while the opportunity is in revisiting 20 year old ideas about stuffing the users' throats with Business Intelligence we think they need!
The opportunities are more in providing end user flexibility in not only getting fancier reports out of the BI system but also in providing flexibility in what is collected, analyzed and reported! These cannot be frozen at any point of time since companies, their products, strategies and tactics evolve all the time! The basic data warehousing needs cannot also be constant or based on 20 year old assumptions!
The opportunities are in extending the capabilities of Business Intelligence efforts from just Sales and Financial data to other things like Operations, Business Processes, etc.
Opportunities are never more than in Business Intelligence today, if only we paid more attention to the users.
Meanwhile we are spending millions feeding the problems!
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. - Charles R. Swindoll
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