There is a lot of literature and talks the power of analysing that the Business Intelligence offers, one of the areas that is under emphasized is the power of measuring which is tied to the human nature.

Try a simple thing in your life, start measuring the amount of money you spend every month start tracking the budget.You might notice that the spend goes down without any additional effort. This is true for an organisation as well.

As soon as you start tracking and measuring things you would notice and improvement.There is nothing scientific about it,it is tied with the human nature as you start measuring things you put in attention to bring them back in the control limits !!

So all those who are planning to go the BI way ....should remember the power of measuring !

I recently read an interesting article on the thoughts of father of Business Intelligence.

Howard Dresner coined the term "business intelligence" in 1989 while an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc. At that time, the software industry was mired in acronyms like DSS (decision support system) and EIS (executive information system), and Dresner was seeking a term that would elevate the debate and better define the analysis of quantitative information by a wide variety of users.

You can find this article on the link.

Thoughts by father of Business Intelligence

The best part I like about this article is the area where he mentions the things that hold up the BI adoption.This is not true just about BI adoption about about all the IT Implementations.

The lines where he says "It's typically not technology that holds adoption back; it's business culture and organization. Technically, we've come a long way. Information objects are getting so much more sophisticated and intelligent. If we could fast-forward in a time machine and grab the software of five years' time, it still wouldn't increase the rate of adoption. You've got to go through that cultural knothole of "Everybody knows how I'm doing." If you have perfect transparency with BI, it's not an issue; partial transparency is the issue. It's "I'll show you mine, but I can't see all of yours."

I have seen this not just at one place but a numerous times where people have a huge reluctance to change.This is also the single most attributable cause of failure for the ERP Implementation.

So guys if you really want IT to work for you get geared up for change and for implementors there should be a lot of focus on organisation change more than the technology peice of it.