I attended a meeting on business intelligence yesterday only to be thoroughly disappointed in the state BI is currently in. I guess I feel like I was a bit setup by the primary vendor, Cognos. The initial meeting request was an invite to a round table discussion by Ziff Davis so I naturally thought that they were attempting to gain some insight into where we thought BI was heading...I thought wrong.
I arrived about 15 minutes late and the group of about 20 were in the middle of introductions...I'm Joe Blow, CIO...and my biggest challenge is standardization... I immediately recognized Tony Winkler (a former Adaytum, now Cognos sales rep and a friend of mine) and the Head Marketing Geek from Cognos corporate. It's then I knew I got setup, I didn't know this was a Cognos event. Since I was already there I thought I would make the best of the situation and participate in the "discussion"...
Then it was my turn...my biggest concern about BI: Reporting is useless. How can you run a company on 10000 lagging indicators a month? Every time a BI sales rep (software sales rep) comes by he's pimping the latest product. There is never any talk about moving toward real BI. BI vendors are experts at reporting and reports. That's all.
Needless to say, I didn't get a very good response from the Cognos marketing guy. He's a smart guy, I've met him, but he and his company still have no domain expertise in anything other than reporting and generating reports from data warehouses or data-marts. Now the Ziff Davis "moderator" keys in and disagrees with me "I disagree, I think quite a few people at Cognos have domain expertise in areas other than reporting". Great, so where are these guys?
I could tell they were confused, however, the rest of the people around the table were nodding their heads in approval. They were either a bit timid about blasting a vendor while he was in the room, or they were so frustrated at the state of BI from the vendors perspective that they believed it was a futile point...I let the snake out of the bag.
My point wasn't that Cognos was a bad company, they're in my opinion the best company in this space. However, they don't even get a passing grade when it comes to Business Intelligence. You can church up reporting all you want, it will never become actual business intelligence that will allow you to measure and react to changes in conditions based on leading indicators.
Cognos purchased Adaytum because of the product and the domain expertise. Adatyum, and now Cognos planning group, sold to the office of the CFO. My final question was why does the rest of Cognos continue to pimp their product to IT guys? If you want to provide real intelligence to Sales, wouldn't you talk to the sales organization? I'm not getting it...I don't think they do either.
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