Business and IT are always at odds with each other with regard to ownership of BI efforts.
In the olden days, there was no question that IT owned BI efforts, decided what tools need to be used and owned the rollout and making it all work together.
These days, many businesses have taken to dealing with Cloud vendors of BI directly without their own IT's involvement.
I know of at least one major International Bank where many Business Intelligence projects are completed outsourced from collection of data, storage and reports generation. None of the data resides within the Bank's internal networks!
Users say that they are tired of IT's ownership of BI efforts and have taken it upon themselves to insulate themselves from IT and just take budgets and go outside the company for BI.
They all have businesses to run and frustrated with IT not being able to give them the reports they needed on time. They just decide we will be doing it ourselves and with external help.
Now for the IT's side of the story - IT has too many priorities and not enough IT budget at any time to do all of what the Business needs at any time. It has a big headache just collecting, cleansing and storing data, let alone creating reports out of them, useful ones.
They have a headache reconciling different identities of products, customers from one system to the next. There are too many versions of the truth within all of their systems. When they bring it all to one data warehouse they have a tough time correlating between different identities of the same entities - customer, product, etc between the Sales, Financial and Manufacturing systems for example.
So what is the answer? Some kind of middle ground will evolve. I don't think there will be an outright victory for one side or the other. It will come to the middle sometime.
Interesting times make for interesting problems and solutions.
May you live in Interesting Times - Chinese Proverb or Curse ?:-)
Yes, agree, but have a different perspective on where the "middle" is. See here http://blogs.forrester.com/boris_evelson/10-05-18-business_and_it_alignment_bi_fact_or_fiction and here http://blogs.forrester.com/boris_evelson/10-07-16-where_do_you_draw_lines_between_business_and_it_ownership_data_and_information
Great post Nari. I agree with you that eventually a middle ground will prevail.
We have a community for IM professionals (www.openmethodology.org) and have bookmarked this post for our users. Look forward to reading your work in the future.