A bit about Dresner's view, the one who coined BI
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 08 October 2011, 02:00 IST
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"Not all the BI projects are purely IT driven" says Howard Dresner, the man who coined the term Business Intelligence (BI) According to Dresner Advisory Services LLC's recently published 2011 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study, worldwide, line of business and IT are now about even when it comes to deploying BI. "Users have a far more substantial role in selecting and deploying technology than ever before," said Howard Dresner, president and founder of Dresner Advisory Services and a former Gartner analyst. "This is about disintermediation," Dresner said. "Most of the emerging vendors are not targeting IT." He described the above concept as, "IT departments aren't meeting their needs quickly enough, and so they're taking matters into their own hands. That, in turn, is fueling another trend these days. There's a huge demand for services, primarily from software vendors themselves and, secondarily, from third parties". He further added, "Even among organizations with well-defined IT departments, end users are securing services from third parties to get things done more quickly. Speed appears to be the primary motivator behind this behavior, but as users continue to deploy BI projects without IT's knowledge, they also are at a risk of perpetuating a fundamental concern that has plagued businesses for years". "This suggests there's an overall expansion of BI, which for the market is a good thing," Dresner said. "However, there's more stovepipes like the ones we've been fighting for the past few decades [creating] more disparate views of the business. In a perfect world, everyone would be using a common infrastructure, but that's not what's happening." According to Dresner, One way to avoid this classic problem is to establish or rely on business intelligence competency centers (BICCs). The centers, made up of company employees, are created to drive consistency into the BI space across an organization. What Experts say about Collaborative BI? Dresner was defining the general consensus that "collaborative BI and collaborative decision-making are different but important and they need a complementary culture for it to work." Mark Bradbourne, a BI architect for Forest City Enterprises in Cleveland, Ohio said, "Corporate culture is everything with the two topics collaborative BI and collaborative decision-making. Old, entrenched corporations seem to rally against forward thinking at times." He points out that if tools aren`t collaborative ready, companies will find themselves behind the adoptive curve. Mike Ferguson, MD at Intelligent Business Strategies Limited points out, "Collaborative BI I think one should integrate BI to enterprise collaboration and not just embed collaborative features into BI. And, collaborative BI needs to allow sharing of BI components to fuel faster self-service BI." Genesis Consulting, a BI consulting firm says, "The consensus here was that social tools may be great for ad hoc collaboration, but they lack the speed and formal business process to be widespread" "Collaboration is a huge business driver and advantage. Companies that embrace collaborative culture will be ahead of the game. And, there's room for innovation within BI tools for embracing this culture".

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