I came across this interview of Bill Hostmann, research vice president and conference chair of the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, held this week in Chicago. This set me thinking today over lunch. Here’s what he says:

“The big message is going to be around tying together information, decision making and performance management. How do we get at the right information to make the right decisions that will drive the performance that the business demands? That’s a shift from the traditional business intelligence focus, which was about query tools, reporting tools, OLAP and data-mining functionality sitting on top of a data warehouse or data mart used by analysts”.

How many of us, who are engaged in this field, think that traditional business intelligence is all about query tools, reporting tools, OLAP and data-mining? Business intelligence has always been about tying information together, eliminating data silos, and enabling the organization make better decisions. Whether they are tools like Oracle BI, or Cognos, or Business Objects or applications like Sales Analyzers, Performance Applications, Budgeting and Forecasting, they have all been about providing the right information and analyses to the right people at the right time. The core purpose of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Data Mining   has always been to help companies make intelligent, informed and insightful decisions. It was never about the tools.

There seems to be a recurring theme among analysts to provide a new spin on Business Intelligence every year – new buzz-phrases are coined, for example, “remove silos”, pervasive business intelligence”, “put the business back in BI”, etc. We tend to value every word that comes out of these much respected analysts, but once every year many of them just re-drape themselves with new words while alluding to the same old thing.

On politics and turf wars, however, Bill’s comments were dead on – I have seen this myself on several client engagements where IT and Finance interact in this way:

” IT says, “Look, we built this data warehouse and you’re not using it, so that’s your fault.” And the business users say, “What I want is more unfettered access to information, but you’re limiting me to this very small subset, and it takes a long time for you to adapt to the kinds of investigation I need to do.” “

The end result of such interactions is always a loss for both IT and the business. Lack of partnership between the business and IT means that useless applications will be developed while IT project costs will continue to rise. Developing this partnership, however, is extremely difficult. As you see in the quote above, IT and business often see each other with some suspicion. Also, there aren’t too many companies that have been successful in promoting cooperation between IT and business.  Data Warehouse project organizations often occupy their own silo, reporting only to the CIO. The developers of these projects have no formal reporting relationship with the business units they aim to serve, so they often end up designing and developing solutions without fully understanding the needs of the enterprise. The lack of accountability tends to steer IT to be more technology focused rather than on the business requirements.

Wherever BI projects have succeeded, companies have managed to overcome this challenge and now use BI as a competitive weapon. One of my previous clients, an online business-to-business auto auction site, was able to transform the DW/BI department from a cost center into a profit center by selling customer transaction data back to their largest customers.  They could do it because: a) they made the CFO accountable for the return on investments on the BI project b) they put the visionary CFO in charge of setting the IT agenda, and c) they integrated their IT organization closely into their core business. For it to succeed, a business intelligence initiative has to be a business initiative, with the business accountable for it, not just an IT initiative with accountability resting with itself.