What is wrong with the Business Intelligence Industry?
Author: Thomas GonzalezI just returned from a great summit meeting for BI hosted by Dashboard Insight, where I sat on a panel with other industry experts. It was a small group of about a dozen of us, and it was a great two day meeting. It was fantastic to have an opportunity to talk with other people who work with the same issues I face every day while working on BI stuff.
I was a bit concerned attending the event that I would not see eye-to-eye with some of these other experts, since I hold a relatively contrarian view when it comes to designing dashboard solutions. I believe that ALL business intelligence systems need to be designed from the top (user) down, versus the bottom (data) up. Pretty much all big BI vendors and industry experts have been preaching the bottom-up mantra for the past 20 years.
On the flight back from the summit I wrote an article that (hopefully) more clearly articulates my position and the logic behind it. You can read it here. In a nutshell I basically state that Big BI and current industry experts have a strong financial interest in not rocking the status quo, and are in fact hindering the efficacy of the very solutions they purport to be advancing.
By any objective measure, BI is long way away from reaching its potential, especially in the eyes of business users and organizations who have implemented seven figure BI solutions. My thesis is that because BI has its history rooted in the collection, transformation, aggregation and dissemination of data that the lions share of focus on any BI project revolves around the data and the not the end user. Reports and dashboards end up being after-thoughts at the end of big BI initiatives.
The BI industry has created its wealth through the selling of these solutions and expertise and insist they are needed to provide an effective BI solution. In my experience this is absolutely NOT the case. You can create a very effective dashboard solution with a very minimal BI infrastructure, although in some cases having a robust BI back end is definitely going to make things easier. As I mention in my article the BI leaders have painted themselves into a corner because even if they recognize the back end is not the place to start, they would end up undermining their primary revenue streams (not to mention customer confidence) if they openly acknowledged this state of affairs.
What I suppose will begin happening, is that more and more start up companies will start to address this schism and we will see a slow movement to more user-centric BI solutions that focus on business and user requirements with online tools that allow integration of distributed and heterogenous data. At the same time I still see a very valid place for traditional BI, as there are still thousands of companies with vast stores of transactional data that needs to be collected, processed, and aggregated into common structures that can be used to help feed the user-centric BI solutions.
"since I hold a relatively contrarian view when it comes to designing dashboard solutions. I believe that ALL business intelligence systems need to be designed from the top (user) down, versus the bottom (data) up"
huh? this area isn't my bread'n'butter but I do have to sit up and take notice of how BI experts do things.
starting from the data up sounds really dumb - your idea makes a lot more sense.
how on earth can someone understand what the data means unless it's based totally on context?
and how can a dashboard be designed without context - which needs expert user input - including workflows.
I admit sometimes a committee will end up with a camel when they're trying to design a racing horse but that's where the business analyst comes in - sort out the wheat from the chaff.
data != information.
I'm just floored that your ideas aren't the norm - they sure make sense to me!
Hi Barry,
I suspect I am not the only one who holds this viewpoint, but not many of the "experts" talk about it. And I don't think it is necessarily that they disagree, they just choose to focus on the details involved with managing data. In the article I linked to I briefly discuss the history of BI and why I believe this is the case.
- Tom