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Don’t blame the BI tools

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I’ve heard some BI leaders this week complain of stalled innovation by the vendors. But Sid Adelman says, “I think the tools are fine… We’ve handed a Stradivarius to a kid after a couple of lessons and we wonder why the violin doesn’t sound so good.”

We’ve done a “shitty job” of the basics, he says. Too much metadata lacks adequate definitions and genealogy—resulting in distrust among business users—and testing and training are too often done poorly.

The most troublesome basic is the human factor. “The organizational and cultural issues will screw us every time,” he says. People who don’t like each other but have to work together, for example, will too often let their adversaries crash on the rocks at the organization’s expense.… Read the rest “Don’t blame the BI tools”

Better than free food at TDWI San Diego

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Two BI leaders walk into the Sunday night reception at the TDWI conference in San Diego. Each is as eminent as you get in BI, and they hadn’t seen each other in months. After hello, they got into what’s more important to them than the free food. One says, “Business Objects and Cognos just don’t get it,” by which he meant all the once-standalone vendors that disappeared last year. As these companies get dragged further into the new parent, they’ll get it less and less.

The other added, “They don’t get collaboration, and they don’t get visualization…The big vendors just can’t innovate fast enough for the market…The next generation of BI will come from a new generation of vendors.”… Read the rest “Better than free food at TDWI San Diego”

Human benefits for BI itself in a slower economy

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If this year’s economic slowdown lets BI-ready companies “kill the competition,” as one consultant I talked to last week expects them to, BI itself will win in not-so-obvious ways.

First, if BI really does show its stuff, projects will attract and keep good people more easily. “Every BI client have been people-short,” says Sid Adelman, “either with no headcount or unable to attract good people.”

Second, BI will finally get the attention of company “big guys,” as one guy puts it (who can be called only a senior ETL architect at a major BI vendor).

Mr. Anonymous says, “I find it astounding that people go into project wo looking at power dynamic in an organization.… Read the rest “Human benefits for BI itself in a slower economy”