Paradigm Shift: Immediate Need to Renewable Resource

Thus far, the common misconception is that BI products need to be custom programmed for corporations to receive benefits from them. As business intelligence is applied widely across a variety of industries, the marketplace is slowly shifting to realize the current business intelligence vendors are providing a product that is not a one-stop solution, but instead an endlessly renewing platform product. As IT dollars for expensive custom data warehousing have decreased, an inverse reaction has also occurred: Corporations are beginning to see BI as a reusable resource. Businesses are recognizing that solutions built on existing data warehouse products can be seen as end products with infinite variation, using the core BI product as a platform the way Oracle is a platform for databases. In short, business intelligence has come to mean paying once for a platform with any number of previously unforeseen applications across the enterprise.

At Systech we have seen this trend coming for some time. Our own suite of BI solutions has gained traction, especially in the complex world of consumer goods manufacturing. Many of the examples in this chapter come back to situations very familiar to me over the years, as we have started to see this trend of a self-sufficient, empowering BI platform take hold. Our vision of the Intelligent Enterprise framework stems from this realization: With BI at the core of an organization, every element of the enterprise maintains an ideal balance of mechanical automation and managerial autonomy.