Jimmy.Brainflush.com

It’s the hottest thing in the industry now. Everyone’s doing it, and everyone wants it. I haven’t seen hype like this since Dragon Naturally Speaking. (TM)

I’m still not talking to my PC, and you’re still not creating whiz bang reports with fancy schmancy dashboards.. But I’m digressing from my point. Maybe you’re a reporting guru, or God Forbid someone call you one… For those of you non-technical people.. Calling someone a guru of anything is akin to calling an escort a whore. When the time provides, we’ll dig deep into that discussion.

My simple issue with BI is this: It’s stupid and unnecessary.

What is BI? BI stands for business intelligence. Shouldn’t that be the warning sign that this is all a transitive hoax?

It’s an umbrella-like term for all things business-related that mght live in a spreadsheet, database, or text file.

Simple BI functions have lived in the comfort of web or win32 APIs and weren’t bothered by anyone other than the knowing report guru or app guru… hidden from view and access from your common business professional. Companies with names like SAP and Siebel and to some extent PeopleSoft have owned majority stakes in providing, delivering, and supporting this fine establishment.. think country clubs pre-1980’s Caddyshack.

As the market has moved away from the tried-and-true win32, and toward open standards, the web API has taken ownership of the day. Heck, most of the core functionality within Microsoft Windows Vista is XML code based.

Some who’ve worked in that space can insert their multitude of arguments in their own blogs, and they do.

  I’ve got one simple premise, and YOU’VE stuck around long enough to hear it:

 Jim’s Law: Don’t recreate existing data to make it user friendly. 

Show it in another form if you must, but DON’T recreate it.  The fact that I have to hightlight this point is sad enough.

Explaining it is even worse.

 Billions of dollars are being spent to recreate existing data in duplicative form for report generation!    I thought for sure that reading Dave Barry aloud ‘at a comfortable pace’ hunched over a microphone for speech recognition was THE dorkiest thing I had ever seen.  

Then I saw this. 

So who do we blame?    We blame the market.

Personally, I blame Microsoft.  Had they innovated win32 fiercely and utilized their network of worldwide facilities to educate and deploy application programmers of … let’s say.. win64?…  none of this would have happened.

I’m kidding of course.  Microsoft answered the demands of the market.  But the tongue-lashing doesn’t end there..  I’ve got one last tie in beef with Microsoft.. and it’s summarizeable.. that’s right, I said it!   Summarizeable in one word:

Sharepoint.

Couldn’t leave the collaboration stuff to Notes and Webex.  Had to put something together and make it BOTH useful and easy to manage.

Sharepoint fueled this BI revolution.  Suddenly, IT organizations started getting these demands from upstairs not JUST for pie graphs and bar charts.. no no..  now the higher-ups wanted to make the bar charts and pretty colors THEMSELVES!

So here we are. It’s 2007, and the “easiest” way to “do BI’ is to duplicate existing data and pull it into my proprietary system???????   Horse doo.

I guarantee you that within your organization, there is ALREADY a tool that can accomplish your BI dreams, and make them all come true.

And, further more, mark my words that the minute you have all of this great data assembled, everyone upstairs will be bored with it.  

It’s stupid, and it’s wasteful.