When Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?
David M. Raab Information Management June 2009 Back in February, this column asked “Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?” and answered a tentative “Yes”. The gist of the argument was that the major obstacle to BI success is the skilled labor needed to build the systems, and on-demand vendors can reduce this through strategies including automation, end-user-driven interfaces, advanced database engines, and pre-built solutions to specialized problems. True as this may be, it is coming at the issue backwards. On-demand BI should not be a solution in search of a problem. The real goal is to identify situations where on-demand BI is a better choice than conventional solutions. In other words, the right question is not whether on-demand BI makes sense, but when. The general answer is that on-demand BI is the right choice when it meets two conditions. First, it must solve problems that conventional solutions cannot. Second, it must not face insurmountable new problems created by t