DMReview : “The Dawn Of The BI Director”
March 31st, 2005 by Mark Rittman
The Dawn
Of The BI Director : “In most organizations, business intelligence (BI)
has always played second fiddle to transaction applications. Organizations have
traditionally lavished millions of dollars on projects to implement packaged
operational applications and rewarded the IT managers who supervised these
projects with hefty salaries. In contrast, until recently, BI projects have
always been an afterthought, viewed by executives as departmental systems or the
responsibility of a few programmers who write custom reports. A career in BI was
seemingly a dead-end for ambitious IT professionals.
Today, the stepchild status of BI is changing. One sign of change is the
growing stature of BI Directors who oversee data warehousing and business
intelligence projects. These days, BI Directors regularly manage multimillion
dollar maintenance and capital budgets, oversee sizable teams of developers and
contractors, and negotiate large deals with software vendors. More importantly,
BI Directors now manage what their top executives consider to be a “strategic
resource” that supports fact-based decision making and keeps the organizations
headed in the right direction.”
