There has been a lot noise around traditional BI being a failed promise. In fact, Market Dynamics, a UK-based research organization, published a report on how Fortune 500 companies are losing millions of dollars in lost opportunities.Can it truly be attributed to traditional BI alone? Well, to answer that question one needs to comprehend the context in which BI is implemented.

Its a well accepted fact that spreadsheet is a tool which analysts, business executives and the rest of the crowd swear by.

Enterprises of varying sizes still continue to depend on MIS reports under the guise of Business Intelligence. The so called BI department keeps churning out reports which I doubt the management ever takes notice of, not that they don’t want to but making sense out of those innumerable reports is like finding a needle in the haystack! So are the decision makers getting the right information?

We had a conversation with a prospect and the client was looking at getting a dashboard - so they could minimize usage of spreadsheets and provide to the end user details they needed, in the format the business users needed.

I was quite delighted to see an Indian organization so forward thinking and looking at adapting the way they work to adopt new ideas that new tools have made possible. And we at India are known to be late adopters? Not anymore!