If BI is to enable quick, daily business decisions on issues such as allocating resources and inventory, users shouldn't be forced to waste time sifting through irrelevant data for answers. They certainly can't depend on IT to do their drilling.
BI and analytic application vendors will take the user's role and responsibilities into account. Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle and others will further link BI into project lifecycle management systems to integrate a much more guided experience with established project methodologies.
What these vendors often overlook, though, is that executives and managers have always had methods of gathering internal information and applying it to their decisions. Maybe they had IT develop a proprietary application that paves the way by automating existing measures, or they might become spreadsheet jockeys themselves. Some simply rely on instinct. Either way, old habits die hard. BI flourishes where executives, managers and business analysts are willing to challenge conventional wisdom, but not all organizations are that adventurous.
From a strategic standpoint, BI vendors are discovering that the best way to overcome entrenched practices and increase their presence is to infiltrate the application, service and process environment that operational workers encounter every day. In this capacity, BI and performance-management dashboards serve as components of corporate portals or other interfaces. Eighteen months ago we reported that Microsoft Excel was an integral part of the enterprise business intelligence strategy--and with good reason. Excel is flexible, provides both numeric and visual representations of data, and can be scripted to provide bidirectional communication that enables write-backs for forecasting or corrections to existing data (see "One Suite To Serve them All").
Some BI vendors are still battling to pry users away from their spreadsheets, but most--including Microsoft--have accepted defeat gracefully and are working to bring BI's benefits to those who prefer spreadsheets as their main tool and entry point. For more on Excel, see "Surrender the Spreadsheet".
