One item that certainly rang true with me was the following from the Stephen Swoyer article: "There is an important caveat, Eckerson concedes: companies must first make peace with the idea that corporate data will be stored outside their own firewalls. “But Salesforce.com has broken through these fears, it seems,” noted Eckerson." Not entirely...many in our IT department are still mightily afraid of allowing certain corporate data (like point-of-sale data) to be made available via Salesforce.com. This is generally the first concern raised by them whenever we talk about exploring any kind of analytical functionality within Salesforce.com.

So, for us, much of the promise of on-demand BI remains blocked by this persistent trepidation around data security. Another potential road-block is the notion that BI can't ever be truly self-service, that significant amounts of training and development are required in order to design and deploy a robust reporting solution. For example, it has taken 10 months and 8 developers to create an OLAP cube for our Marketing department (resulting in palpable frustration on the part of the users who needed this functionality yesterday), and it is being proposed that "power users" on the Business side will require weeks of official training and partnering with IT developers before they can be deemed proficient enough to design and deploy Business Objects dashboards off of our EDW data. It has even been mentioned that the mere mortals of BI, the basic report consumers, may also require some level of training before they can successfully use these dashboards.

This all seems to fly in the face of the vision Wayne Eckerson puts forth in his book "Performance Dashboards":

"The drag-and-drop nature of ADEs [Analytical Development Environments]
will shift development responsibilities away from IT staff and application
developers. With an ADE, a power user can easily modify a packaged
analytical application, flesh out a report definition, or create a new
application or report from scratch once IT has established data connections and query objects. Thus, ADEs will once and for all get the IT staff out of the business of creating reports so they can focus on what they are best at: building robust data architectures and abstraction layers for end users. ADE tools will also accelerate the trend towards rapid prototyping. Developers and power users can use an ADE tool in a joint application design session to get immediate feedback from users on data, application screens, metrics, and report designs. This iterative process results in better designed applications that are delivered more rapidly."

While this doesn't speak to On Demand BI specifically, I think it addresses the spirit of it. Users shouldn't have to wait months to benefit from BI, nor should they have to go through a lot of arduous training before they're able to design, publish and analyze reports based on a common data platform. As Mark LaRow states in the recent 'What Works' magazine from TDWI, "To achieve broad-based self-service, companies need a BI technology that offers 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWIG) design, eliminating user training in report design." I think Salesforce.com has mastered the WYSIWIG interface; therefore, the prospect of placing such a hyper-flexible and user-friendly application on top of a solidly modeled On Demand data mart or warehouse is not only exciting but the way I feel things need to go in order to bring "BI to the masses".

-Mike

[...] Good day! cool post -really insightful. [...]