by Angela Guess
Hugo Moreno recently wrote in Forbes, “The fact that corporations around the world are embracing business intelligence (BI) should come as no surprise. As you’d imagine, the advanced analytics developed by world-class BI practitioners leads to deeper insight and significantly enhanced performance. But decidedly newsworthy is the degree to which the most successful BI programs are migrating toward a self-service, distributed BI delivery model—a sort of analytical enablement.”
Moreno goes on, “A recent Forbes Insights report, ‘Analytical Enablement: How Leaders Harness Distributed Intelligence to Drive Breakthrough Results,’—sponsored by Qlik and based on a global survey of 449 IT and business professionals—reveals that the most successful BI programs are significantly more likely to feature a distributed model for analysis. The term “distributed” in this context describes a condition where data is made available to, and can be modeled and analyzed by, business units themselves.”
He continues, “Note that in a distributed BI environment, data governance—protecting its integrity, reliability, completeness and security—can still be maintained by a central IT or BI function. Moreover, a central BI team can still play a critical or even leading role in assisting executives throughout the firm with analysis and perhaps the development of fundamental dashboards. But the difference is one of enablement versus control. In a distributed environment, business units themselves have a greater degree of self-service access to both data and analytical solutions. In other words, those executives closest to the day-to-day business—arguably those with the most motivation to drive business improvement and the keenest intuitive insight—have greater freedom to model, explore and examine data at their fingertips.”
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