Why It’s a Bad Idea to Build a Business Intelligence Platform from Scratch
In the past, I’ve read many articles that support that building BI is actually better than buying it and some of the top reasons for this are 1) company-issued BI do not have all of the data needed 2) Company-issued BI tools don’t have the right models, relationships, attributes, and hierarchies 3) Company-issued BI tools are too restrictive in their data models.
So when I recently came across an article that contested this idea and supported the idea of buying BI versus building it, I felt the need to bring it front and center. The name of the article is “Build vs Buy: Business Intelligence for Big Data Analytics,” written by Dwight deVara. In this article, Mr. deVara cited a large and extensive BI project that resulted in a fairly crude BI application. deVara described,
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“A friend of mine is a Python developer for a billion-dollar corporation. His team is building a custom call center reporting app that connects to the company’s cloud data storage via APIs. I’ve seen some of the application and while it’s impressive for a custom system, it’s mostly tables of numbers with the occasional pie chart. This is after 8 months of work, and the only people accessing the system are a select few big data scientists.”
deVara then goes on to talk about why buying BI is easier and presents steps that make building BI cumbersome and difficult. deVara explained,
“Some companies are going down the road of custom BI platform development, but their efforts are no match for solutions that are already available. Below is a list of what you’d need to do to build a BI platform from scratch. You’ll quickly see why the effort and expense aren’t worthwhile.”
Step 1: Hire a team
Step 2: Add security
Step 3: Build an analytical engine
Step 4: Use connection pooling
Step 5: Take out the trash
Step 6: Add visualization
Click here to read the full article and get full descriptions for steps on this list.
Doug Atkinson
An entrepreneur and executive with a passion for enterprise technology, Doug founded Solutions Review in 2012. He has previously served as a newspaper boy, a McDonald's grill cook, a bartender, a political consultant, a web developer, the VP of Sales for e-Dialog - a digital marketing agency - and as Special Assistant to Governor William Weld of Massachusetts.
- What’s Changed: 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms - October 13, 2015
- Hitachi Data Systems Announces Intent to Acquire Pentaho - February 11, 2015
- Public Service Announcement: Best Practice Guide for Big Data in the Public Sector - January 28, 2015
