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).