BI and technology adoption

To follow-up on a question raised by someone at my consulting firm... why is BI group usually late adopter (compare to other group inside the enterprise) in terms of technology?

In fact, I've been asked this question by a manager, and at first, I did not exactly what to respond, actually my first reaction was to think that the big organizations were reluctant and hesitant to add more technology to a platform already loaded (or bloated?) with tools, difficult enough to manage and for which ROI is certainly not obvious to calculate.

After putting additional thoughts, I now feel that reasons are found inside and not outside BI. Traditionally the BI designer and architect come from a database background and culture, and these have a tendency to be more skeptical about new technology (they may well be right on that one!), whereas the general software development crowd usually come from computer science background very much inclined in looking into latest innovations ...


In general I have observed that it is among people running more operational systems, who are already used in adopting technologies, that will turn down proposal to connect to the BI platform using less traditional way. It is rather BI group itself which keeps proposing to send flat files to feed other external systems or give read-only access to their database (because these are familiar communication channel coming from the familiar ETL process). And when you propose to expose these information as web services instead: you get a funny look!

The outcome of this fact is that we often end up with BI platform that is very isolated (silo-type application) from the rest of the corporate integrated architecture. This penalizes the potential usefulness of BI... which could be leveraged better and exploit in a more transparent and integrated way into the existing corporate Business Process.


Hence there is no doubt that BI would gain by adopting technologies like web services, and architecture such as SOA, ESB? And there are a lot of initiatives along these lines... this is inevitable.


Martin