Posted by Juan on 22/12/2009 under Articles, How To | 
For a long time one of the hottest discussions in the BI arena has been the concept of Enterprise BI vs Departmental BI, Top-down approach vs Bottom-up, Pragmatism vs Idealism. In this corner we have Spreadmarts, spreading like a virus throughout the organization to provide a quick and dirty fix to the desperate need of end users for timely information out of IT databases…..and in the other corner we have multiyear, multimillion Enterprise Data Warehouse initiatives that focus first on creating infrastructure, BI governance committees, data integration, while end users keep waiting for the very much needed information.
Read more of this article »
Posted by Gilles on 04/06/2009 under Articles |
In an earlier post I asked myself if Qlikview needed a datawarehouse or that Informatica needed a frontend. This discussion is going strong ever since and ever before. Qlikview sales and Qlikview fanatics claim that there is no need for a warehouse, Qlikview can do it all! I certainly do have my doubts about that! Ronald Damhof a Dutch Information Management Architect, who is much respected by myself as well by the BI Community in The Netherlands is strongly agitated by the message sent out by qlikview fanatics.
He came across this post here, (a very coloured and not to toughtful blog) which triggered him to react on this here , which eventually leaded to a bigger and little agitated reaction here. I strongly agree with Ronalds points in his reaction, but I’d like to add to the discussion that Qlikview can also act as an enabler for new Business Intelligence initiatives or as a quick problem solver.
In a company, where there is no formal BI program and excel sheets are created everywhere and send anywhere to support most decisions, Qlikview can be the start of a more formal BI program (as any tool could be). The strong points of Qlikview here are its rapid deployment, quick results and a quick ROI. So Qlikview with no datawarehouse could be a good option for a company with a low level of maturity on BI. The risk here is that Qlikview works so good, that it easily can replace excel for the BI needs and what you’ll see happening is Qlikview applications all over the place, with no allignment and a lot of departemental BI solutions.
When BI needs grow, requirements become more clear. That is where we, BI professionals, should help our customers on there way to maturity. With a good (architectural) development of the BI program, both business wise as technological. Not selling a mamoth when a mouse is needed, but designing a great mouse with the mamoth in mind.