SOLUTION BRIEF
Does Your Data Center Know What BI Is? The Problem with Old BI
77%
of CIOs believe analytics and business intelligence will have the greatest impact on organizations during the next two years.1 – Deloitte
According to the news source, legacy BI systems have a fatal flaw that makes them almost irrelevant in the modern enterprise. That flaw boils down to the concept of silos. Traditionally, IT and business operations have been built around dedicated silos in which different teams operated. Various technologies were similarly split, allowing everything to be more manageable as each key group within an organisation operated at a small scale. Similarly, IT would have leaders devoted to network systems, databases, security, system administration, the help desk and other tasks.
A Data Center Knowledge story analysing this study explained that the emphasis on business intelligence is somewhat bittersweet.2 On one hand, it’s great to see that CIOs recognize the value potential of BI and are working to ramp up their investments. On the other, BI has been shown as a priority in studies like this since 2006. It’s been a decade and BI is still a top concern, why is that?
BI technologies were initially designed with these silos in mind. The report explained that BI teams would operate as their own entity, divided from the rest of the business, and work to analyze data from various sources to deliver value for specific user groups. The result was even more silos than existed in the first place as BI data became isolated into various compartments. Modern enterprises are breaking silos down, and BI strategies must be transformed to allow for more user input, greater flexibility and the ability to support decentralised enterprise organisational structures. At the same time, governance is still as important as ever.
The report explained that the problem facing businesses is actually somewhat straightforward legacy BI tools can’t keep up with the demands of the modern enterprise, creating a situation in which consistent upgrades and advances are necessary.
All of this adds up to major challenges in the data center, as managers must eliminate the BI silos between different technology units and find ways to unify information to get a more robust view of everyday operations.
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