A view of BI (part 3)

At the end of last year I posted the first two parts of a piece on my view of BI. Spurred on by Nicholas Goodman’s post on the Pentaho workshop, I thought that I should get around to finishing part 3 of my view of BI.

The ‘swan’ I mentioned in part two of this series is in fact an offer around integrated Business Intelligence. Like the folks at Pentaho, I believe, there is a strong case to provide an integrated environment that can reliably deliver actionable information to the people that need it at the time they need it. To achieve this the whole technology stack involved needs to be integrated. Not just the reporting, data-mining, dashboards and scorecards of the presentation layer (and here I include the content delivery portal and any electronic content management) but we also must integrate the backend databases, real-time feeds and ETL layers into a single integrated environment. To information consumers the whole process should appear seamless. The challenge for system integrators like me is to deliver the glue to join all of this together