Unlike many of my new midwestern colleagues, I spend a lot of time missing planes. In fact, because of a 30 minute delay in Indianapolis yesterday, I won't be able to get home to Los Angeles until about 6pm tonight. Bad luck piles up over time, an early start beats fast running.
So while it might not seem like such a big deal to you, I'm wondering why more companies have not invested in BI clouds. I asked a few folks over the past week and got some blank stares when I talked about cloud computing related to MobileMe. But I hope that will not long be the case, especially as it is clear that Rolta (my new Daddy) is seriously invested in SOA, CA Unicenter type controls, Managed Services and Hosting. It's just a matter of time before it becomes clear that there are a lot of candidate companies for some extraordinarily nice IT around EPM and BI. The sooner the better. Any delay now may keep the whole industry stumbling.
It's all next to impossible to get people in corporate IT to stick to some standards established by the know-it-alls. And I must confess that I've spent a whole lot of time just learning exactly how many PM Methodologies are inferior to the sort Leah Wheelan got us working on a decade ago in AFSG. But the hub and spoke and active data warehouse and Agile JADs can only go so far - that is until you move to the next customer who wants to do it their way. Knowing this, I like most folks haven't even bothered much to listen to the know-it-alls. I mean how many projects have been delayed because the customer says 'yeah we need MDM but nobody wants to pay for it, besides, we've got deadlines'. Meanwhile the hierarchy gets rejects every pass and people invent department codes at will.
Such things would be eliminated by a company that hosts EPM - because we would own the standards, and the hardware, and the network and the security, and before you get into our heavenly cloud, St Peter would make sure you had your master data in order.
I've been thinking about hosted BI since 2003, not that me thinking about it matters much. But I think I've finally found some folks who can and will step up to make that kind of service offering a reality. As with most things, I remain cautiously optimistic and keep asking 'what can go wrong'. As the business case is made or not, I will report.
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