“We had the data, but we didn’t have the information.”

Business intelligence analyst Boris Evelson wrote a nice post on the Forrester Blog entitled “… we had the data, but we didn’t have the information…“.

It’s a good read, but here’s the punchline for the impatient:

Many large enterprise Business Intelligence vendors have robust, scalable, function rich products, and many management consultants and global systems integrators have reference architectures, solution accelerators and other best practices necessary for successful BI architectures, applications and implementations. The fundamental IT and BI components for fact based decision making are out there, ready to be used. Now it’s up to our business and government leaders to use this information to get us out of the current crisis and avoid new ones!

I suspect that part of the problem is that most enterprise BI software languishes as shelfware, so complicated that only a few IT employees know how to use it. If we are going to realize the value of BI software, it needs to be readily accessible to the decision makers who have domain expertise but lack the time or patience to become IT experts. We need to enable Joe the Business User to make informed decisions.