BI in the Cloud

Earlier this month, I was at a BI conference with two days of presentations by a stream of analysts talking about what was going to happen in the market and companies (mainly IT leaders) talking about how they did BI at their companies. What struck me is that these IT leaders could have given the same presentation 5 years ago. The themes were common and the challenges predictable.

Presentation after presentation by IT professionals took one of two angles:

1. We built a huge, super fast data warehouse and let me tell you how we did it; or
2. We built this home-grown system to do BI, let me tell you exactly how.

In the case of the big data warehouses, there were some very cool approaches with some real innovation.

In the case of the home grown systems...help! One VP of IT was proud that he built an operational data store from the ground up. Another was proud that he put a tremendous amount of business process in place, but lets users pull data down into spreadsheets and do what they like with it - strict process with loose data governance. Another said it all starts with the data: identify all the data, get it in a data warehouse, then figure out what to do with it.

Doesn't the IT organization have more value-adding contributions to their company than simply building systems from scratch that are commercially available today?  Are these really examples of innovation in BI?

- How about CIOs talking about how they drove business benefits for their companies?
- How about VP, IT architecture talking about having business needs drive analytics that drive data that drives the solution?
- How about Directors of BI talking about how they leverage open source or SaaS to address a certain set of specific requirements from their user community?

Let's hope we're not hearing the same stories of "BI success" three years from now.

Is there any innovation around BI going on out there by IT organizations? Are they simply reluctant to talk about it? What do you think? What are your stories?