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« A Tussle Over Semantics About Semantics | Main | BI 101 » September 27, 2007BI 'Democracy': Too Much of a Good Thing?
One theme that is constantly being voiced by BI vendors and proponents these days is the deployment of these tools in more of a "democracy" setting -- making analytic capabilities to as many employees across the enterprise as possible. In essence, moving toward an analytocracy. (Like that word?) This is in line with the long-term drive to flatten the organization chart -- pushing decision-making as close to the line as possible. As I mentioned in a post a couple of months back, in a survey I helped conduct with Cognos and the Oracle Applications User Group, we found that we're still a long way off from the ideal analytocracy. BI reporting remains tied up in IT departments, and is still limited to analysts or certain decision makers. The majority of respondents to the OAUG survey report that it takes more than three to five days to get a report out of IT. Overall, the survey found, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to BI and corporate performance management tools. Lately, Ann All over at IT Business Edge has wondered if perhaps we should tread with caution before rushing into unfettered access to BI. She points to a Computerworld article that describes the challenges two major corporations had when they opened up their BI more to the masses. For example, Del Monte had to wrestle with having several departments using different sets of business rules and filtering to produce reports, resulting in multiple different versions of the truth. The company’s director of business systems and decision support is quoted as saying that “too much flexibility and ad hoc capabilities in the hands of the wrong person can result in islands of autonomy, homegrown subsystem processes and the proliferation of multiple versions of the truth.” Valero Energy Corp. also encountered similar issues, with users running reports on multiple different versions of data before it consolidated all its reporting into a single data warehouse and set of front-end reporting tools. However, the company had to provide a great deal of end-user training and education to build usage of the new environment. “'Don’t assume, ‘If we build it, they will come,'" the IT director said. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
