BI Maturity

This isn't a comment about the maturity of the BI industry, data warehousing methodology, or information visualization tools. This is a thought about how "business intelligence" goes through local cycles within a particular organization. Obviously, there are a lot of different paths that "business intelligence" can follow within any given organization, and that path is greatly influenced by industry and geographic business drivers, technologies, personalities, politics, lack or presence of champions, corporate culture, philosophy, and a myriad of other things.

Sometimes, "BI" takes a turn for the worse as it matures in an organization. It seems like there is a fine, but dramatic, line between "huge success because it is a centralized group of people" to "huge failure because it exists in isolation". The question is, can an organization going through this sort of transition leverage the opportunity to reach a both-and resolution:

• Yes, the BI organization was headed down a path to failure and irrelevance;
• And, yes, BI is an even more critical idea than ever in our organization.

Here's how we go forward, successfully leveraging BI expertise in the organization while also distributing an understanding and philosophy about business intelligence that is relevant across the organiation ---- after all, shouldn't every part of the business behave as intelligently as possible?