Innovation may undermine authority
According to a recent Gartner report entitled Emerging technologies to drive self-service business intelligence, much of the innovation in the BI platform market will come from emerging technologies that make it easier to build and consume analytical applications. "Lack of both end-user and developer skills is frequently cited as a major barrier when deploying BI applications," the report says. "Anecdotal evidence suggests no more than 20 percent of users in most organisations use reporting, ad-hoc query and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools on a regular basis. Emerging technologies such as interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, BI integrated search, SAAS and SOA will help overcome this skills gap in both the construction and consumption of analytical applications."
26 November 2008
These technologies, says Gartner, will help reach 80 percent of users who aren't using analytical applications today, helping to grow the BI platform market and reducing the labour required by central teams to deliver BI projects.
"However," the report cautions, "they will also introduce potentially troublesome consequences by marginalising the role of IT in delivering [multiple] analytical applications. Many of these technologies have the potential to dwarf the spreadmart problem, making it easy for rogue business units - and even individual users - to create their own analytical applications that scale bigger and look better than anything IT is building today. Organisations will need to reconcile the benefits of these technologies against the potential to undermine ongoing efforts to standardise BI architecture."
ITWeb Premium
Get 3 months of unlimited access
No credit card. No obligation.