Blog: Jill Dyche

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BI: It's Not About the Platform Anymore

In which Jill explains her view that the platform is a commodity, gets some dirty looks, then--more aptly than you might think--quotes Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband. You'll just have to read it.

I regularly make the claim that BI is no longer about the platform, it’s about the business capabilities it delivers. The BI tool vendors usually prick up their ears when they hear this, while some DBMS and hardware vendors make faces at me from behind their conference proceeding handouts.

Simply put, technological advances are blurring the lines between applications and databases, and the days of planning technology acquisitions according to some pre-fabricated IT logical architecture are long gone. Companies are different, their business requirements are unique, and platforms have become a commodity.

At Baseline, we have a concept called the BI Application Portfolio, which stresses that data (on a data warehouse, or in general) should evolve along with business capabilities, and that both should be deployed incrementally over time. We design these BI Portfolios for our clients, and no two are ever alike. This speaks to the distinct nature of companies’ strategies, as well as the continuation of best-of-breed approaches to technology acquisition.

The good news about the commoditization of the platform is that IT professionals can spend less time and money sharpening specialized product skills. BI, data warehousing, and data management professionals don't have to spend precious time on configuration, maintenance, and “feeds and speeds” issues, and more time understanding data usage requirements, calculating ROI on existing or new applications, determining acceptable levels of detail, resolving what “right time” really means to the business, evaluating emerging software solutions, enhancing their evolving BI portfolios, and a host of other proactive work that can actually help their companies grow.

I don’t usually plug vendors in my blogs, but I tend to listen more intently when they corroborate my points. I recently sat in on a briefing by StrataVia, a software firm whose product, Data Palette, standardizes and automates core database administration functions by availing a set of Standard Operating Procedures through a centralized DBA workbench. These automated SOPs allow DBAs to not only manage heterogeneous platforms, but to automate often-complex—thus, manually intensive—administration tasks. The ability to apply best practice operations to normally cumbersome work frees DBAs to focus on more proactive, business-centric work like gathering new user requirements or doing acceptance testing or tuning individual queries for performance. [Disclosure point: neither I nor my firm has any business or financial relationship with StrataVia.]

It’s sort of like that old joke about Zsa Zsa Gabor’s fifth husband, who once said, “I know what to do. I’m just not sure I can make it exciting.” By focusing less on specific tools and generalized frameworks and instead optimizing our technology, data, and human assets, even DBA jobs can be exciting again!

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