Future of BI

The Gartner Group makes a couple predictions about the future of BI. First, between 2009 and 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. Faced with the need to make better decisions companies will seek to increase their investments in BI systems.

Another important prediction is that business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for BI despite the fact that IT departments are responsible for building and maintaining the BI infrastructure. The reason for this situation is that business users have lost confidence in the ability of IT departments to deliver the information they need to make decisions. Faced with these problems it is no wonder that the business unit will take it into their own hands to create the BI infrastructure. A BI system that does not meet the users' needs will fail. This is because the failure of a BI system to deliver useful information can have a strong, negative impact on decision making.

However, IT departments are charged with building and maintaining IT infrastructures they are better suited to this role. Again, although IT organizations excel at building BI infrastructures, business users have lost confidence in their ability to deliver the information they need to make decisions.

Not surprisingly there are risks when business units create their own BI infrastructures.

"By making purchases independently of the IT organization, business units risk creating silos of applications and information, which will limit cross-function analysis, add complexity, and delay to corporate planning and execution of changes...IT organizations can overcome this by encouraging business units to use existing assets and create standards for purchasing classes of packaged analytic applications that minimize the impact of isolated functions".

 - Garner Group


Building on existing resources is an excellent way to develop a BI system. However, this does not solve the problem. An important step is that business units and IT departments must accept that BI systems are composed of architecture and an infrastructure. The business unit should lead the creation of the architecture whereas the IT department should lead the creation of the infrastructure. Ideally, the company will have a cross-function BI unit that creates, maintains, and updates all BI systems. This allows each group to perform the function they are best at and use resources as efficiently as possible.

This book presents a methodology to build this type of system. By dividing the building of frames and frameworks into three distinct stages it allows the business unit and IT department to focus on what they do best. Further, this approach encourages and demonstrates a process by which business units and IT departments can work together to build a BI system.