Here’s what we talked about, with my commentary added …

Background

Jeff: Tell me a little about yourself, your background.

Shawn: I started out by having my own consulting company called IntelliThought in Tennessee. We had a tremendous SQL install for Eastmen Chemical and moved them off of AIX over to DB2. From there, I went over to Accenture for about 18 months but then Microsoft came calling. I was at Microsoft for almost five years as a SQL Server technology specialist when I started. I left to go over to the management side and started the solutions specialist community which was designed to build solutions using SQL Server as well as the other Microsoft products. A lot of BI solutions, a lot of business decision support systems. Then I went to Oracle and ran the application server sales group. It was BI solution building work under global sale services. I talk a lot about build-based BI systems, because I think that’s the mindset of the world when you’ve grown up with Microsoft and Oracle.

When I came to SAP, I began working on the BusinessObjects acquisition. We [at SAP] realized they were a vendor that truly had an end-to-end, productized, standardized platform that matched SAP’s productized ERP solution. It became evident to us what we needed to do–to get out of the BI tool business and buy someone that could provide full top-to-bottom standardization, metadata, and master data … to have them consume the key metrics out of our ERP platform and make them available to our customers. We’re not trying to buy additional vendors. We believe in a complementary partner approach. We made the announcement so we weren’t going to disrupt BusinessObjects or force any SAP technology in there.

So, I’ve come full circle from building it to making money on building it as a consultant to selling the vision “if you buy these tools, learn them, and build a lot of complex pieces, then eventually you’ll have a data warehouse” to where I’m at now. I’ve evolved to a focus on business execution instead of having to wait for execution while you go down into the IT/technical weeds and build a bunch of software. Using a platform like BusinessObjects, you can depend on a robust, full-featured reporting solution delivered by a company that sells the solution and its configuration and discussion of what’s the best way to implement the solution, rather than a toolbox you have to invest a bunch of additional work into.

Jeff’s Commentary: Even from my first impressions of / interaction with Shawn, it was clear to me that he was A) very experienced, B) very knowledgeable, and C) very charismatic. He certainly livened up the Grudge Match, and clearly brings a lot of enthusiasm to whatever he does. Shawn’s brief introduction of his career demonstrates that this is not his first bar-b-que. He’s worked for a number of big shops, been exposed to several competing philosophies in the sale and delivery of BI tools. And he’s implemented solutions for large and small companies in lots of contexts. This makes him an ideal candidate to have an opinion on where BI is going and on how to appropriately approach complex BI initiatives. I was eager to get his thoughts in this brief interview. For more about Shawn’s background, check him out on LinkedIn.

Considerations Before Launching a BI Initiative

Jeff: What is the number-one thing companies should consider before launching a BI initiative?

Shawn: The first thing is you need to do some CSI forensics. Sometimes BI can be a little like Monty Python and the Holy Grail … a lot of crusades, but what really became of all of it? What separates a successful, game-changing BI project or a BI initiative from the 647 that happened before? In my experience it comes down to two or three things. First, it comes down to integrity–not just of the products or approach or planning, but the integrity of the people that hold themselves to a certain level of commitment and excellence. Once that integrity begins to change into taste or a favorite tool, product or vendor, you’ve lost your integrity, and your initiative will begin to slide. You need to think about your CFO standing in front of your shareholders or a bunch of financial analysts, or even worse, standing in court having to explain why he missed his forecast or why information got out from under the business or why there wasn’t governance that prevented the fraud or misuse of customer information. Those are the kinds of things that override taste or preference or religion or background.

Most BI project initiatives need to be thinking like a CFO or a board member with the end in mind from the very beginning … putting the right outcomes out there at the onset of the project. This is because BI projects, more than any other projects, really play in to IT’s need to be cool and IT’s need to craft and build complex things. The key is to move from being an engineer (building things) to being more a strategic business leader (driving value). Think of it in terms of instead of being a field commander or somebody who crafts villages, you need to think of it like a Macarthur or general who says, “Where are we trying to go? What market share are we trying to take? In what ways can I empower this business to grow and acquire and merge?” To build those kinds of thoughts is what makes a BI project truly strategic. It also improves careers. But if you take the other approach–the “build something really cool” approach–then you’re quickly down to the weeds comparing vendor A and B and it becomes a game of taste.

Jeff’s Commentary: First, I’m impressed about Shawn’s ability to weave a Python reference into the interview. Second, I couldn’t agree more with him on the content of his response. He uses words like “commitment” and “integrity” to describe the building blocks necessary for a successful BI initiative, where I use words like “intentionality” and “discipline.” At the end of the day, we’re talking about the same thing: It’s not necessarily about the product; it’s about the people, processes, policies, standards, data involved. All these things require integrity–Shawn’s word–if you’re going to be successful.

His point about alignment between the Business and IT is also crucial. The days of business guys being ignorant to technology and having it work like magic are over. So are the days when the IT guys didn’t need to understand and speak the language of the business. Successful BI requires a close partnership between business and technology leaders, including technologists who can imagine themselves in the shoes of the CFO in Shawn’s proverbial board meeting.

Most Common Mistake

Jeff: What is the most common mistake you encounter in a company’s thinking when approaching BI?

Shawn: It’s the idea that we’re one interface away from greatness, or that we’re one data schema away from greatness, or that we’re going to build something amazing that’s going to achieve greatness. Or, perhaps thinking that your company has very unique needs. This betrays that you don’t really understand business, especially the competition, works.

The fact is if you go into anyone’s kitchen and you open the utensil drawer there’s going to be a knife, a fork, a spoon, etc, because that’s what we all eat with. Maybe there’s a chopstick in a few of them, but the key is that you can use common tools and eat just about any kind of food. So people need to standardize tools and then they can think about what kinds of food their customer eats. Whether you’re buying your food at the market or growing it yourself, regardless of sourcing, you need to think about the delivery. The same is true of technology. You need a standardized way of delivering data, because it’s the standardization that drives adoption and use. It’s not how cool you are or how in depth or complex the data models need to be.

The reason Excel is everywhere is because people know how to use it. Even though there may be a million sources behind it people dump it all in a spreadsheet and manipulate it themselves. The way you stop that is … you don’t stop that. You give them better and richer tools and make them more independent and self-servicing so they can continue to do what they were doing but in a way that doesn’t break or isn’t stringently tied to standardized data models or data schemas. You have to empower them, but empower them in a standardized, easy to use way. If you miss that, or if you think you’re going to create or craft something new and unique, then what you’ve effectively done at that point is cut off the end user’s ability to act. They have to learn what’s in your mind and how you built the data model or how you built the system. So use a knife or fork and spoon and concentrate on a consistent, standardized way to deliver it.

Jeff’s Commentary: This section is also basically focused on not getting the cart before the horse. BI is not a technology, it’s a disciplined approach to data. I love his “one interface away from greatness.” There are lots of companies out there that believe they’re one tech purchase away from perfect efficiency and data-driven clairvoyance. That’s a lie, plain and simple, and I love that Shawn calls it out.

I would also add to Shawn’s call for standardization – a call for simplicity. Enter one of my mantras: If your BI report or dashboard is not mind-numbingly intuitive, then it will not reach its potential.

Future of Business Intelligence

Jeff: What’s the big thing to look out for in the BI space in the next 5 years?

Shawn: The first thing is that you should be thinking about inter-business BI. This is a whole new market. What I mean is that you have tools in your company for reporting and forecasting and I have tools in my company for reporting and forecasting, but we need to think more like Microsoft and Wal-Mart. For example, the Wal-Mart model is: “I (Wal-Mart) will guarantee that I’ll buy these widgets from you (mom-and-pop widget manufacturer) at a nickel a piece, but you have to: a) make five million of them, and b) you have to have them here by Tuesday. If you do all that, I’ll buy them for a nickel a piece.”

Imagine if that model went across all business and we all agreed to that you’ll ship these in 2.5 days and you’ll do it in less than six minutes to pack and ship. If there was some way to sit in the middle and have a reporting tool and a forecasting tool that managed SLAs to contracts and agreements between companies, it would be amazingly valuable. You’re going to see a standardization in that SLA-type KPI reporting between multiple business entities. The first vendor who can say from the perspective of the cloud that the two companies have these expectations and are performing these KPI’s against a set of inter-company SLAs, will rule the field. That’s where you’re going to see the BI industry going.

Jeff’s Commentary: I think Shawn’s insight here is very good. I’m also seeing calls for truly federated data warehouse models, and these are far less standardized or vetted than traditional models. Data governance, master data strategies, data warehouse architectures, and much more will ultimately have to evolve to support multiple, distributed businesses working together.

Closing Statements

Jeff: Would you like to make any kind of closing statement?

Shawn: I want everyone to know I am incredibly impressed with both the people involved at Capstone and folks from the ITA. I’m impressed with the focus and intensity you guys put toward this. This is the right pursuit, this is the right conversation because IT itself is changing. There’s a great movie called Tucker and it has Jeff Bridges in it, where he’s a guy in a garage who built a Tucker automobile. Now you cut to the big three automakers but they are now struggling because Toyota and Honda are killing them. They’re not struggling because they don’t make good cars but the perception is if you want standardized, reliable quality, you want a Toyota or a Lexus. They’re struggling because of the perception of complexity and the risk of not knowing what you’re doing. Similarly, there’s a shift happening in IT quality. The people in the room that are asking hard questions are focused on that shift and what’s the right thing to do for their company.

Jeff’s Commentary: Thank you so much to Shawn for his kind words and for being willing to chat with me on the record. I appreciated his passion and insight both at the Grudge Match and afterwards in this interview.

Company: IBM Cognos
Presenter: Paula Doyle, Account Executive
At IBM: Unknown
In BI: Unknown
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Winner of the “Best Breakfast Award” at the roundtable!!!

IBM has only owned Cognos for a little over a year.

Paula rightly pointed out that as long as data is just sitting on a hard drive, it’s a liability. It has to be intentionally converted into knowledge assets that inform practical decision-making, which is what business intelligence is all about. Bravo!

IBM’s focus has been data management. Without Cognos, they had no presentation layer; hence the impetious for purchasing Cognos. However, Paula didn’t really elaborate on why Cognos specifically was chosen. That said, I would offer that Cognos is a fantastic tool for presenting data, if you know how to use it. It’s certainly not an “easy” tool to use. It falls squarely in the category of “powerful and complex,” in my opinion, and as with many such tools, the more powerful it is, the steeper the learning curve to truly master it and make it an effective choice for your enterprise.

Paula explicitly said that Cognos permits IBM to help users present their data as knowledge assets without requiring them to convert to an all-IBM infrastructure.

The speaker dodged technical slides repeatedly, which was uncomfortable and not what I’d hoped for in the grudge match. However, they did bring useful literature and the technical resource IBM brought with them did great in the panel discussion.

She also mentioned using BI to improve productivity and reduce headcount. Paula said that Cognos helps companies “improve productivity of workers using reporting, analysis and finance by 20% and … reduce asset levels by up to 15%.” Uh … okay. I’m inherently skeptical of numbers like these, but even if it’s true, that would leave me cold if I were the guy analyzing tools for my fledgling BI initiative. Of course, there are huge efficiencies to be gained with business intelligence, but I don’t think the strength of the principles and concepts of business intelligence are in a reduced cost of payroll. Rather, it’s in empowering your employees to work smarter not harder. BI allows businesses to do more with their staff; to allow them to be what and who the company needs them to be (and what they want to be), rather than spending all their time manually pushing data around in spreadsheets.

Paula very briefly mentions IBM’s “TM1 solution,” claiming that it helps increase ROI, but doesn’t elaborate at all. She’s referring to their in-memory OLAP cube solution which allows quick access to massive amounts of data. It increases performance and makes accessing large datastores more convenient, but I’m not sure it’s on my top-10 list of selling points for the business value of Cognos.

She also talked about the universal delivery platform that is Cognos. This is definitely a strength of the tool, allowing authors / creators of reports and other analytic tools to present valuable BI tools through a great many channels. But this is hardly “author once, deploy anywhere” as is suggested by the speaker. You have to keep lots of things in mind to deploy something on the web vs on your Blackberry.

Lastly, Paula referred to a single metadata layer as a strength of the Cognos tool. Although Cognos does a great job sitting on top of an enterprise data warehouse and presenting a semantic layer through report authoring tools, it’s the architecture and model of the data warehouse that will lead to a single source of the truth before the tool somehow magically gets that done for you.  As with many BI tools, if you use Cognos well, it is powerful and productive tool, but it doesn’t do the hard work of BI for you.

Overall, I grade this presentation: C

Unfortunately, IBM has requested that their video not be shared with a public audience. I’m working to get their permission to put it out here, but for now, nothing.

• Select any three.
• Feel free to write in an “other”.
• Remember, if you vote for SAP, Microsoft, Pentaho, or IBM then you’re voting to bring these guys back for round 2.  (Read more about the first round with these four vendors: Original BI Tool Vendor grudge match.)

What is “Open Access to Data”?

Open access does NOT mean that everyone has access to everything, or that necessarily any one person has access to everything (from a business user perspective). Here’s a definition that will make some of you squirm.

Open access: All users in an organization are granted access to all data in the organization through a defined, intentional, repeatable process, in accordance to their individual role and prioritized need for that data.

So, it’s not giving everyone access to everything, it’s giving everyone access to the RIGHT things to improve their job over time. And remember that this is more evolutionary than revolutionary in healthy organizations. Those who target a big bang frequently end up with a bum fizzle. The early-and-continual delivery of value is far preferable, in both the short and long terms.

What is “Self-Service Data”?

Industry pundits hopped up on the buzz of business intelligence throw around the term self-service with impunity, hoping that BI will deliver to them some magic universe in which every conceivable reporting or analytic requirement can be accounted for by a “self-service portal” front end to the wonder of the data warehouse. The truth is that no such indefinite and infinite vision to the horizon is possible. Even in the most ideal world, you will never experience a 100% self-service environment.

Here’s what BI will not do for you in this realm …

There are too many people in your organization devoting too many hours to manually massaging and manipulating data in response to totally unpredictable (seemingly random) requests for aggregated, cross-referenced, or other newly-contextualized data sets. BI does promise that over time, these manual efforts will be replaced with a uniform data model, capable of fielding ever-broadening, increasingly complex knowledge requests from the data. This will free up your data/statistical research experts to be more strategic and attend to a higher-order of complexity, but the demand for them will not go away. Success means making these resources more strategic over time, not eliminating them.

What BI will not do for you …

Alchemy, card tricks, cold fusion, or other magic reliant on some illusive silver bullet. BI is more about discipline and intentionality than any form of magic. No overnight miraculous change of any kind will occur.

Summary

Don’t deal in all-or-nothing scenarios! Companies expecting it to take 3 months (or even 3 years) to go from 100% manual ad-hoc request management to 100% total automation of all reporting are going to learn to live with disappointment … the hard way. Ask yourself, “What would you give to gain 20% automation per year at the cost of creating 10% new demand for higher-order higher-complexity higher-value ad-hoc requests (which drive more manual request management and therefore drive new requirements of the BI environment)?”

This is a far more realistic scenario.

Company: Pentaho
Presenter: Lance Walter, VP, Marketing
At Pentaho: 4 years
In BI: 19 years
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Pentaho has existed for 5 yrs. Lance was VP of Product Marketing for BusinessObjects before Pentaho. Before that at Siebel, Hyperion, and Oracle.

Pentaho is an open source solution to BI. Lance touted the depth and breadth of the team assembled at Pentaho from many other BI companies with many years experience, talking a bit about awards for Pentaho and their customers.

He mentioned that it was important to focus on what it means to be successful in BI and cited slides from TDWI, but didn’t really spell much out. He did admit that a single tool isn’t going to be a silver bullet. He said, “You can succeed or fail with any tool.” Kudos! Love that honesty.

Lance’s “angle” (his word) is that Pentaho requires very little investment (being pretty much free and all), so return is easy to come by.

Pentaho spends a lot of time handling in-bound sales calls and little on marketing and pursuing out-bound sales. Interesting.

Lance sees a lot of “requirements distortion” in other vendors’ proposals. He feels many other vendors view their solution as a hammer, so every problem becomes a nail. I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. But he did little to differentiate why Pentaho was different other than just saying it is.

Open Source TCO is often assumed / rumored to be very high, This is because in the old days there was no single throat to choke, no accountability, few standards, etc. Many of these risks have been fairly well mitigated. Pentaho’s for-profit corporate umbrella and support contracts serve to significantly address these concerns. I, for one, am far less leery about leveraging the Linux’s, Pentaho’s and MySQL’s of the world now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago.  Lance made this case with a story that demonstrated how little evidence there is remaining to make this kind of high TCO case against Pentaho. All good, and I think his story is telling.

Of course he highlighted the strength of having an open-source community continually working on improving their software. And I do think that’s a strength, especially given that Pentaho is managing/prioritizing requirements, performing quality control, and leading (supplementing) the community with paid on-staff development teams. Plus, when the community submits code back to Pentaho, then Pentaho is on the hook to support it, maintain it, update it, etc. Very beneficial symbiosis.

“IDC has talked about how open source is the most significant IT trend in the last 20 years … bigger than client-server, bigger than thin-client applications, etc.” I gotta say, I’m not sure I buy that. But whatever. I put only limited stock in the analysts and the pundits anyway.

Gartner found that Pentaho customers rated them very highly for customer satisfaction. Impressive, and flies in the face of the old perspective of open-source as “built in someone’s garage.”

Gartner also has evidently validated the Pentaho model as a good strategy for penetrating a market that’s continually trying to decrease TCO.

Lance touted the interoperability of Pentaho’s tool suite with other vendor’s tools. This is great. I’m all for primary integration at the data warehouse level, not at the presentation tool level. However, there’s a real concrete cost to having multiple tools in-house. Many companies have a hard time getting their people up to speed on one tool, let alone two.

I thought the most devastating blow he landed on the competition, though, was when he talked about how the customers of other vendors would receive maintenance invoices for the coming year and suddenly be highly motivated to consider Pentaho as a potential replacement to the systems they have in-house. Obviously, there would be much more involved in that kind of switch than just deciding to pay a bill or not, but it does give you pause … as well it should the big “expensive” vendors.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A-

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Balance. Much of life is about balance. Not only in BI, but on myriad fronts, you’re going to have a hard time being successful until you learn the art of balancing long-term and short-term gain. In both our business and personal lives, it’s a basic human tendency to forgo delayed gratification for immediate, hear and now returns. Forget saving, let’s buy on credit. And forget the long-term vision, we’ve gotta deliver on this quarter’s numbers.

I view these philosophies as imbalanced to the near-term and subsequently dangerous. But in the execution of Business Intelligence in most organizations (or the failing attempt thereof), I notice just the opposite trend …  Plans and roadmaps that are long on strategy but very short on immediate return.

Let’s face it, you’re never going to get the opportunity to deliver on your long-term, three-year strategic vision unless you justify / demonstrate some serious returns long before that. The fact is that nobody is going to fund an initiative for that long (if at all) that is packed with theory and promise, but doesn’t return on the investment.

If BI is to be successful, we have to knock out quick wins along the way to continue to justify the existence and perpetuation (read: funding) of the initiative. So, here’s my tip of the day:

For every year in your strategic BI roadmap, define and execute three short-term wins with the following characteristics:

1. Choose tasks that can be implemented in 30 days or less with no complex dependencies
2. Clear, return on the investment in these tasks can be measured / demonstrated (ideally quantitatively) 30 days after that
3. Target tasks at the pain of key players in your organization who are skeptical about BI’s capacity to help

In so doing, you’ll take a huge step forward in justifying your initiative and proving its value in the short-run as a vital stepping stone toward your no-doubt awe-inspiring vision for BI.

Company: SAP BusinessObjects
Presenter: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
At SAP: 5 years
In BI: 15 years
Gift selected: Capstone Hat

Using the banking system of late, Shawn said, “It’s not enough to provide volumous access to information, and expect good decision-making to happen as a result.” AMEN!!! This was the best statement made during the presentations made at the Grudge Match. I agree 10,000%.  I feel like SAP focused more on the solution of BI than on a product, and while that was a little off topic (per se) for a Tool Vendor Grudge Match, it still “made my heart happy.”

He says “Context” is what is missing from BI today, which is exactly in line with what we’ve talked about over and over: turning “data” into “actionable knowledge assets.” It takes more than just context and getting context takes a lot of people, process, policy, data, and technology, but he’s definitely on the right track … especially for a vendor presentation.

“The problem is not BI and it’s not the tools, it’s that we’re [backwards] in the way we think.”

Love the analogy to the airplane he uses. BI should provide automation in the way that most of the time the plane flies itself while the pilot reads. Only when something happens that the computer can’t deal with does the average pilot kick in with all his expertise. Also, he referred to the black box … full of information, but it’s a little late when you’re “fishing it out of the lake.” Great stuff. Analogies are your friend in helping lay people navigate the complexity in concept that is BI.

The “Excel drug” …  beautiful … Shawn claims that BusinessObjects will help get your business users into Excel rehab, so that they’re less likely to break off pieces of data and create new data sources, and more likely to use the system to get what they need from data that remains connected to the single source of truth in the enterprise data warehouse.

He claims that SAP is “other vendor neutral” … that it’ll work with whatever you have in house. This is a tall order. “Why go with the market leader?” he asks. “More support for a wider set of architectures, worldwide services and support, a bigger ecosystem, etc. We work with everybody.” His point is that BusinessObjects is designed to sit in front of any solid foundation of data in the backend. To an extent, of course, I agree with what he’s saying, but there are definitely pitfalls associated with the BusinessObjects product that he’s glossing over. It certainly does not support every complex query you could conceive of in the independent way he’s describing, for example. Also, BusinessObjects has a tendency to silo your data in universes. As long as the universe is truly universal (which it almost never is), then you’re fine. But end up with 100 universes, one for each department (a common destination for firms that build “bottom-up”, btw), and you’re in big trouble. Integrating those universes is definitely not the seamless fun that he’s making the product out to be.

So, not perfect by any means (what is?), but definitely a great presentation, exactly on target conceptually, and SAP does have a very powerful, very significant product.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A

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It’s so common to imagine that if a company just purchases some expensive tool, they’ll get an awesome reporting solution. Or, the more mature companies think that if they get some processes in place, learn some best practices, add some responsibilities to a couple of their staff, and maybe buy a new tool, then they’ll have access to vital data in their new beautiful reports or dashboards. Closer.

Still more mature …  If we do everything company B is doing above AND we have a data warehouse in place that implements at least the basics of dimension modeling best practices, surely then we’ll be golden … right?

Well, I have to say: no. This is all good stuff I’m hearing, but my concern is the entirely wrong focus of all of it. The bottom line is that BI is not about reporting, it’s about intentionality.

The purpose of Business Intelligence is to put in place the discipline (synonym for intentionality) to convert an organization’s unique data into vital knowledge assets by which the leaders of that organization can make better decisions. What you build when you build BI is this discipline, not some reporting infrastructure … no matter how advanced. What you get when you build it is a set of lenses—reports, dashboards, scorecards, applications, widgets, portals, etc—through which you can make better decisions to advance the mission / goals of your business.

Company: Microsoft
Presenter: Dan Vandercar, Technical Presales
At Microsoft: 4 years
In BI: 15 years
Gift selected: Capstone Hat

Dan’s presentation focused a lot on Microsoft Office as the end-user delivery vehicle for Microsoft-based BI. This has obvious pros–the almost universal proliferation of the Office product, universal look-and-feel/common interface, and extremely advanced analytical features, particularly in Excel and even more so in v2010 than in v2007. And Excel 2010 is going to be even more powerful in this role, as it will support an infinite number of rows, more tools for data mining and cleansing, etc.

But this is actually where my concerns lie as well. I don’t particularly like Excel’s impact on BI. Of course I understand that business users are addicted to it and that it’s very powerful. But when business users export a CSV from their favorite database or tool, roll it into their meticulously crafted Excel spreadsheet, and evolve it over weeks, months, even years … it becomes a source system. Achieving a single source of truth is harder, and integration of these Excel-based “systems” and the business logic they contain back into the data warehouse is extremely difficult. So, if Excel is the big value-add for Microsoft (and it was certainly the cornerstone of this presentation), then I become concerned. They even went so far as to point out that the integrated ETL features of SSIS make it even easier for users to pull data from the data warehouse (where it belongs) into Excel. This doesn’t make me warm and fuzzy.

Dan rightly pointed out that SQL Server has really “grown up,” now in v2008 truly a contender in the large dataset arena. Terabytes in SQL Server 2008? No problem, according to Microsoft. And that’s long overdue. He also mentioned that MS spent $9B in R&D last year. Rock on! I like hearing that.

I like that PerformancePoint is now rolled into MOSS, giving it dashboarding features out of the box. I don’t have much PerformancePoint exposure, though, so maybe someone with more experience here can comment further.

Last, one of the most significant points in this presentation is the number of partners, VARs, consultants, whole companies, etc. that use Microsoft tools to implement BI solutions. That gigantic developer community plays a very significant role in the ongoing evolution of the tool and in the ready availability of the help end users need to be successful with it.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  B

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I would suggest that one reason why so many BI efforts fall short (or outright miserably fail) is that they are approached fundamentally wrongly. In my mind, all the articles cited are saying similar things: there was too much “lock smart guys in a room” and too little “collaboration between IT and the business.”

*pounds table*

I want process agility.

I want continual interaction with the end user community, business requirement drivers, and project stakeholders.

I want more communication, milestone sign-offs, RAD modeling, and the like.

Maybe you could get away with writing your Visual C++ app in a vacuum 12 or 13 years ago, but those days are long gone. If you don’t put the business guy on the development team (he’s called the Product Owner … feel the Agile software development love … see also here and here), make cross-functional business teams responsible for the requirements, the priorities and the data (read: governance), and develop software incrementally in short iterations, then I submit hitting the fast-moving target of the organization’s requirements for BI will be next to impossible.