Also, I should add, if what you have right now is working for you and you don’t see it limiting what you’re trying to get done in the future then don’t mess with it. If the Microsoft stuff is getting you where you want to go, don’t change horses unless you need to.

Anyhow, thanks for the note. It’s great to hear from you!

– Ben

We attended a presentation last spring from the IB folks here in GR. They had some interesting things to show, but it didn’t make a lot of sense for us since we are Microsoft clones. Good luck with your future endeavors, hopefully they turn out well.

Rich

Reporting environments differ from company to company. The combination of informational needs (and wants), technologies utilized, the quality of the data environment, benefits obtained, and skill sets of the information analyst(s) all play a vital role in the success of a particular business intelligence (BI) footprint – not just BI standards.

I often wonder why BI tool vendors continue to come up short meeting the differing needs of companies. Are the BI standards driving business decisions and changing business processes for companies that utilize BI tools? Or should this be the other way around – the business decisions and relevant business processes drive BI standards? My vote is the latter.

On many occasions, I have been successful in trading off the benefits of a large BI implementation for a substantially smaller environment (MSAccess and a good VBA programmer). In these cases, the ETL and data warehouse was all that I needed – not the existing BI environment(s). Another example is the concept of a “temporary sandbox” for information analysts to experiment – most production BI environments do not support this idea, what a shame.

…Glenn

Let’s hope someone’s not throwing this post back in our face in 30 years (actually, let’s hope they are).