Infoworld has an Interview with Howard Dresner the Chief Strategy Officer of Hyperion. Belwo are some excerpts from the interview:

IDGNS: What's held up BI adoption?

Dresner: It's typically not technology that holds adoption back, it's business culture and organization. Technically we've come a long way, technology has helped a lot. Information objects are getting so much more sophisticated and intelligent. If we could fast forward in a time machine and grab the software of five years' time, it still wouldn't increase the rate of adoption. You've got to go through that cultural knothole of "everybody knows how I'm doing." If you have perfect transparency with BI, it's not an issue, partial transparency is the issue. It's "I'll show you mine, but I can't see all of yours."

Second-tier management is concerned about losing their secured information and the ability to position information in the best possible light. Once BI is in place, people can get concerned and reveal hidden agendas. There are no more secrets. The right people have access to what they need. There are three groups -- early adopters who just dive in, those who suffer from inertia and a small group trying to work against goals of the organization selfishly.

IDGNS: How will BI develop?

Dresner: Customers want to buy a portfolio of functionality, they want it to be fluid. Service-oriented architecture plays into it and Web services. For instance, before a company grants someone financing credit, you'd want to access their propensity to pay. It's about managing a process and integration in context of the process. We support the management of process with technology. Before, we did the analysis in isolation.

BI will persist. We're seeing an inflection point in the market and hearing more about BPM and BPM enabled by BI.

Source:: 1

Prashanth Rai