Business Intelligence suffering from “Only fools and horses” syndrome

By Bozidar Kralj, on October 10th, 2010

Business Intelligence suffering from “Only fools and horses” syndrome

Remember Dell, Boycie, Broom and other guys form “Only fools and horses”? After 3 weeks of show live broadcasting results were horrible and BBC considered to cancel show. But within the house was stated that show is excellent and audience need time to get used to it.

Suffering from only fools and horses syndrome in business intelligence industry means that there are many functionalities but only few are being used. For example there is a discussion on linkedin about BI serving only for reporting. Reality confirms this statement. Despite so many available modules users stayed mostly at only one module in one telco company for example. Time is needed and users will switch to other modules like planning, consolidation and specially masterdata module in this particular case. Time is keyword.

BI industry brings many benefits but for their successful life procedures and environment need to be to certain point be stabilized. It is very hard to implement complex platforms where market changes overnight, organization and products also follow changes. At the end procedures and production systems try to follow changes. BI system should add value on it? Hardly, because ground is shacking all the time. Having great value and knowing it will provide benefit to customers is a question of customers need time to recognize benefits. Custom and advanced solutions usually need time before optimal usage. New solutions are installed but used only by IT geeks. After a while other users start to use application and then application start to pay investment.