Comments on: Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI

By: Good News: Good Data Newsletter July 2009 :Good Data

Good News: Good Data Newsletter July 2009 :Good Data — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:00:52 +0000

[...] Roman’s blog – Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI [...]

By: Podcast: Cloud Computing Forecast is Change, Followed by More Change | The IT-Finance Connection

Tue, 05 May 2009 18:21:22 +0000

[...] Note: Last week, Good Data Founder and President Roman Stanek posted a commentary entitled Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay at his blog. I spoke with Stanek [...]

By: Structured Methods › links for 2009-04-27

Structured Methods › links for 2009-04-27 — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:07:13 +0000

[...] Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI | Roman Stanek Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want economical Business Intelligence solutions and they will pay ANY price to get it. [...]

By: Neil Raden

Neil Raden — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:15:26 +0000

All of the reasons cited are certainly true, but the overarching reason BI hasn’t been successful is that it failed to deliver something useful and relevant to the work that people do. Prior to the rise of data warehousing, analytical systems were sponsored by and supported by business units, not IT. Because data warehousing required the participation of IT to both host a large database and provide access to source systems that weren’t often very stable, the entire enterprise became an IT project. As a result, IT enlisted the services of the large consulting firms, all of whom turned the whole mess into a giant IT PROJECT. That’s where everything went off the rails and we saw the introduction of foolish ideas like “get the data to the right person at the right time so they can make better decisions,” or the single version of the truth dogma.

The BI software vendors were happy to sell big contracts to IT instead of a handful of seats to the finance department. The analyst firms and industry “influencers” were all in collusion, wittingly or not.

This whole drama needs a jolt of reality. BI needs to return to people, not databases. As Roman correctly points out, the mega-warehouses represent a tiny fraction of the population and prove nothing. And what’s worse is that the industry seems to be careening from one next big thing to another – SaaS, unstructured data, operational BI – to name a few. What is needed is some rich understanding of how people work and how they use information, how decisions are made (or not) and what we can do to provide something useful, not “fish stories” about the size of our databases.

-Neil Raden
Hired Brains

By: DavidL

DavidL — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:36:42 +0000

Good article. I would add that there aren’t only proprietary solutions on the BI market, but also open source.

I think Open source software could be more economical than proprietary tools, just looking, for example, at the licence cost. But there is a lot more to talk about. And these savings are important in these times of IT budget restrictions.

Thanks for the article.