It is tragically sad that any CIO feels you need to eliminate technologists from creating a valuable solution. Really, it is an indirect way of just hoping that if you buy something expensive, send someone to training that the work will just do itself.

We’ve implemented BI and the only thing that was of real value was the fact that the shiny dashboards made the various departments sit down and actually discuss data, structure, and priority. So after the “discovery” period and analysis, data was re-jiggered into 3rd normal form. Dashboards applied and yahoo we have data again!

I hate to sound so bitter when first communicating with you, but I think what has really been a detriment to our industry is the “reading edge” of technology aimed at management, and CIO’s in particular who have let PowerPoint addle their brains. Sometimes I think Business Intelligence means you outsource your intelligence as you descend from the management cloud and let the consultants do the hard stuff for you.

I like what you are saying here. I’ve run into the non-technical business leaders that think of Business Intelligence as some sort of package they buy and then useful numbers somehow magically make it into executive summaries.

End of the day, meaningful numbers and statistics are frequently the result of a good bit of technical work.

Chris

This post was mentioned on Twitter by AaronErickson: Blogged: Business Intelligence does Not come from a Product: http://tinyurl.com/RealBusInt...