The Analytical Masses
sponsored by IBM
ABSTRACT:
Like many of today's most prominent business software platforms, the birthplace of business intelligence (BI) was within the IT department. Since the foundation of any fact-based insight is the underlying enterprise data, it stands to reason that the technical leaders with the most knowledge of, and access to that infrastructure would be the very same that would create the charts, reports, and dashboards that comprised the early generation of BI. The challenge many companies found, was that the way the data was manipulated and the perspective from which the analysis was performed were typically colored with a technical mindset rather than an eye for business relevance. After all, how could one expect deep expertise in sales, marketing, or finance from an IT manager?
The new paradigm is one that espouses alignment of IT and business through the segregation of responsibility. Rather than spending time creating, recreating, and altering charts or dashboards on the whim of the business user, IT leaders can devote their intellectual horsepower to building a more robust information infrastructure, creating linkages to more and different data sources, and ensuring the optimal functionality of the company’s technical investments. On the other side, the business users can apply their experience, expertise, and business instinct towards creating better modeling techniques, asking better questions of the data, and generating more meaningful insight.
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