The problem with BI 

By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 30th July 2007 11:29 GMT

I find that the problem is with the allocation of budgets to projects and departments.

These then to claim onwship of things like servers and software with no consideration for the data apart from what the project was designed to do.

Where I am, I have been trying to put across that hardware like the servers and the software like databases should be part of a central IT infrastructure.

When projects are designed they do not source the hardware and software themselves but request the resources from the central IT infrastructure. As part of the deal, the data corresponding to the final solution is made available to the BI resource (which is also another Infrastructure component).

So far this has not gone down too well as the project managers are outside their training when considering things like this. The IT director takes more notice of their views (as projects are more visible to higher management) and not the operational managers.

There is some progress with SOA. As an overall requirement of a tiered level service could have a BI layer added without too much trouble. However, it's still the same struggle to get project managers to see the benefits which are nearly always outside the projects remit. Not to mention the retro fitting of said tier to the existing services.