Ben Worthen in his Wall Street Journal “Business Technology” blog “The Death of Gut Instinct” discusses how:

“For the third year in a row, CIOs (surveyed by Gartner) said that ‘business intelligence software,’ which organizes and analyzes the data companies collect, was their top tech priority.”

Ben further comments:

“…information-technology departments have used those (previous BI) projects – which usually involved building a giant data repository and installing software that can look for trends in that data – as stepping stones to greater glory.”

I am very excited by the continuing growth of business intelligence and performance management efforts across enterprises of all sizes and all industries. There is real business value to these projects. Business people realize it, not just IT folks.

There is something, however, that concerns me because it is either being left unsaid or, worse, being taken for granted. Business people, and in many cases industry analysts and pundits, associate an IT project with the customer facing software. An IT project is then considered a Business Objects, Cognos or Hyperion project rather than, say, a financial data warehouse project.
But these BI tools would be worthless without data, and, especially, data integration. Without gathering, integrating and “packaging” the data, the BI tools provide just slick demos – no business analysis.

Ben does observe that the BI projects “…usually involved building a giant data repository…” but he credits the BI software as something that “…organizes and analyzes the data companies collect…”.

If it were only that simple.

Someone has to gather the data and business requirements, determine the business rules and transformation, define the data and performance metrics used in analysis, profile the source data to understand its data quality and any inconsistency, and then determine how the data needs to be “packaged” for BI consumption, i.e. potentially building OLAP (on-line analytical processing) cubes.

After all that you “just” have to physically gather the data, make it consistent, via such processes as Master Data Management (MDM) or Customer Data Integration (CDI), perform data cleaning (if necessary), integrate the data, and then transform it in the data “package.”

THEN you can use BI software to analyze the data.

I am very excited that BI remains at the top of the CIO priorities. I am even more excited that data integration is what enables those BI software projects to be successful.