Comments on: The fine line between Business Intelligence and Business Irrelevance http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/04/22/the-fine-line-between-business-intelligence-and-business-irrelevance/ Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:28:22 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: D.McMunn http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/04/22/the-fine-line-between-business-intelligence-and-business-irrelevance/comment-page-1/#comment-227936 D.McMunn Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:23:49 +0000 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/?p=867#comment-227936 As a 10-year professional consultant in the data warehousing/BI industry, I would like to share a simple observation. The sad truth is that many Fortune 500 corporations are seriously data quality ignorant, but still believe they have "business intelligence". They are drowning in "data", but the data is either so inaccurate (or worse just enough inaccurate to pass for accurate) they are frequently making "bet your business" strategic decisions, forecasting, regulatory and risk management decisions on data that is as unwashed as a Porta-Potty in Juarez in July. The effort to integrate this data with other enterprise data is where its untidiness begins to raise alarms and concerns in the C-suite. "Why does our sales dashboard have a number for the next year revenue forecast that is over $1M more than risk management/accounting/investments?" Until many large organizations step back from their focus on BI and commit more budget / resources to continuous data quality improvement true business intelligence will never be able to live up to the promise proffered by many: "The right information at the right time to the right people." It just can't happen with inaccurate, incomplete or stale data. As a 10-year professional consultant in the data warehousing/BI industry, I would like to share a simple observation. The sad truth is that many Fortune 500 corporations are seriously data quality ignorant, but still believe they have "business intelligence". They are drowning in "data", but the data is either so inaccurate (or worse just enough inaccurate to pass for accurate) they are frequently making "bet your business" strategic decisions, forecasting, regulatory and risk management decisions on data that is as unwashed as a Porta-Potty in Juarez in July. The effort to integrate this data with other enterprise data is where its untidiness begins to raise alarms and concerns in the C-suite. "Why does our sales dashboard have a number for the next year revenue forecast that is over $1M more than risk management/accounting/investments?" Until many large organizations step back from their focus on BI and commit more budget / resources to continuous data quality improvement true business intelligence will never be able to live up to the promise proffered by many: "The right information at the right time to the right people." It just can't happen with inaccurate, incomplete or stale data.

]]> By: Todd http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/04/22/the-fine-line-between-business-intelligence-and-business-irrelevance/comment-page-1/#comment-155531 Todd Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:22:41 +0000 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/?p=867#comment-155531 It will be interesting to see how unstructured and semi-structured resources from Twitter to Twine play into the social layers of your funnel. Will semantic constructs matched with widgets provide some needed glue to break traditional data out into the enterprises social fabric and place it alongside more free flowing information sources? How about just simple data mixing from two or more persons in the organization (long the task of e-mail and spreadsheet)? Will services push data to the edges where users can more readily combine it in visual metaphors as opposed to just linking Excel to this or that back end source. Does a Swivel (www.swivel.com) like approach help the funnel gain that collaborative edge? I'm not sold on the model driven RIA frameworks yet. It will be interesting to see how unstructured and semi-structured resources from Twitter to Twine play into the social layers of your funnel. Will semantic constructs matched with widgets provide some needed glue to break traditional data out into the enterprises social fabric and place it alongside more free flowing information sources?

How about just simple data mixing from two or more persons in the organization (long the task of e-mail and spreadsheet)? Will services push data to the edges where users can more readily combine it in visual metaphors as opposed to just linking Excel to this or that back end source. Does a Swivel (www.swivel.com) like approach help the funnel gain that collaborative edge? I’m not sold on the model driven RIA frameworks yet.

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