BI Presentation is Published
My talk last April on Business Intelligence is up on the Technology Executives Club website.
Business Intelligence continues to be an enterprise that, in my humble view, tends to be too tied to particular products, and not to specific domains. When people look for BI experts, they look to expertise with some variant of a tool, rather than expertise in a relevant domain. This, and the fact in general that BI is tightly coupled to persistence technology (i.e. databases) I believe is a barrier to doing effective BI, as when the limiting factor becomes technology expertise rather than domain expertise, it limits the talent pool greatly.
Similar to those who see SOA through the lens of product companies that push SOA solutions, rather than as a broader architectural concern that should be technology independent, it seems BI should be seen not in the lens of Oracle, Microsoft, or any other software vendor, but through a more outcome oriented lens. That is, BI solutions should be things that you buy to help you achieve particular functional goals (i.e. increase sales) - with BI technology competing on the basis for efficiency in enabling those goals.