Views on the News: BICCs, BI Pervasiveness, Gartner — and Alexander the Great

April 6, 2009

Editor’s Note: Periodically, The IT-Finance Connection takes a look around the Web to find worthwhile business intelligence-related content. Here are four commentaries that have been posted in recent days.

David Loshin, who is the President of Knowledge Integrity Inc. and runs an “Experts’ Channel” for The BeyeNetwork, discussed his attendance at Gartner’s 2009 Business Intelligence Summit. His column touches on the changing nature of the concept of the Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). He suggests that many tasks performed by BICCs are being integrated into the applications themselves. Consequently, BI is becoming less of a separately addressed function in an organization and more an integral element of the platform being used to accomplish whatever task is being performed. Thus, the notion of BICC must change.

At KMWorld, IDC analysts Dan Vasset and Brian McDonough look at the trends related to the increasing pervasiveness of BI both within organizations and in the relationship with outsiders. The two authors offer a good deal of insight. The takeaway is that the dissemination of BI tools is something that doesn’t just happened. The most effective organizations are aware of what is going on and control the process. The bottom line, according to Vasset and McDonough, is this:

Organizations embarking on or continuing their path toward pervasive BI need to decide how to allocate their scarce human, capital and IT resources to tasks and projects that have the biggest impact on increasing the diffusion of BI throughout their organizations and to external stakeholders.

The keys include the degree of training; the speed at which BI features are added; the effective use of governance procedures; non-executive involvement and the prominence of performance management methodology.

Seeking Alpha columnist Rick Sherman makes a couple of simple but good points about the influential Gartner Magic Quadrant. The first is that the BI vendor community is mature, and changes in the Leaders’ group will be minimal from year to year. But, he says, it is important to pay attention to the other categories of the study, such as the one that assesses niche players. The key takeaway is that companies should just look at the leaders. Instead, they shouldn’t consider Gartner’s findings — all of them — within the context of what they are trying to accomplish.

This Express Computer piece written by Kesavan Hariharasubramanian is a bit off beat – Alexander the Great doesn’t come up in many business intelligence commentaries — but very enjoyable. The first half is a look at how Alexander went about defeating a far greater force than his. Hariharasubramanian’s point, which he discusses in the second half of the commentary, is that the conquerer used what is in essence good business intelligence to give him the infomration he needed to neutralize the Persian’s advantages and extend his own. He offers an example by applying the approach used by Alexander to the challenge of gaining stakeholder buy-in for BI implementations.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence