Roundtable

Decision-making tug of war

Large-enterprise BI stack or small and agile point solution? It doesn’t matter: you can still kill yourself with too much process.

01 November 2011

Certain aspects of business intelligence are drowning in their own bureaucracy. Is it possible today to put in a solution within a month that just gives you the real answers you need for your business? Or does an enterprise have to fend off solution providers’ efforts to mould its business around their software, rather than the other way around? What’s happened to the platform versus best-of-breed argument? Is the complexity too much for the all-in-one stack? For Craig Stephens, principal solution manager for business intelligence at SAS Institute, the most complexity in BI projects happens around integration.

“People expect to be able to access information on more devices. I think we’ve been party to our own downfall in some of these cases where essentially we’ve promised we can deliver across all platforms but have run into complexity working with other vendors that have grown through acquisition. So we’ve had to deal with their integration components on top of ours, as well as the customer’s specific requirements. There’s a lot of mish-mash of technologies because people haven’t grown much organically. There are two camps to BI: one is to get real intelligence for the business and the other for regulatory and compliance projects. For a compliance-type project, it’s a long cycle with box-ticking and change control. The more agile guys are using BI to get information out and so can afford to be far more flexible.”

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