Enterprises Are Moving to Self-service BI

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Business Intelligence Trends and InetSoft Innovations. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Are you finding that enterprises are moving to self-service business intelligence applications, and if so, can you tell us what some of the reasons are for this?

Mark Flaherty (MF): Absolutely, we are seeing that. And there are many reasons for that, and we will definitely come back to all of them, but I think the main one is that even though we have been talking about the business and IT alignment in most of these application segments, business intelligence specifically has been the most challenging.

And I think this slide that you see in front of you probably shows that very well because if we think about the different objectives, different priorities, different goals from businesspeople and their IT counterparts, as you can see, they don’t really always align very easily.

They actually pull us in completely different directions. So if we think about something like an ability to react to ever-changing business requirements, obviously the world doesn’t stand still, and every day you have a new competitive threat, or you have new merger-and-acquisition activity. So businesses need to react on a dime to be able to address all of these changing conditions and be able to analyze them.

But on the other hand, IT is tasked with controlling the application and managing risk. So, obviously, agility and flexibility doesn't really align very well with risk management. It’s almost kind of one or the other. Or if you talk to any businessperson, obviously on the top of their minds and the top of their agenda is really being able to fulfill their business requirements for analytics or decisions.

When you talk to an IT person, yeah, they also point out that they are entrusted with keeping a set of standards, so that they can avoid all sorts of redundancies and duplications of efforts. Once again, these two needs are pulling us in different directions.

We can keep talking about this and we have got plenty of examples, such as, as I said, business need to react to something that happened today, they need to make a new set of decisions. But IT is all about planning because obviously, if you react to every situation, well again, as I said, you are going to have tons of efforts that are going to be redundant and overlapping.

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