Everyday organizations, small and large, are faced with new challenges and decisions that need to be made. The questions asked might be slightly different, but in essence size doesn’t matter.

Well founded decision making is based on having the right information to base your decisions on. To facilitate complete, correct and timely information delivery, large corporations implement extensive multi-layered Business Intelligence architectures. And even though small or medium sized organizations require the same information quality and timeliness, most of these organizations do not have a similar type of architecture in place. It’s clear that data volumes are smaller within SME (MKB) organizations, but a layered BI architecture isn’t solely designed to deal with large volumes. The different layers allow for the storage of history, (controlled) integration of different data sources and the data remains traceable to the source.

Such a BI architecture can however be expensive. This concerns money as well as investing in human capital and infrastructure. It makes sense not invest a big amount of money and resources when the business case is not quantifiable and the return on investment unknown. New up-and-coming BI tools position themselves as complete solutions which make a data warehouse redundant. Other tools directly report on the (OLTP) source systems and integrate on-the-fly. This type of tooling obviously does not deliver on history storage or traceability, but it allows for (simple) data integration and the delivered front-end/reporting tools are visually persuasive.

These tools might not be as easy to implement as advertised and organizations will eventually run into trouble with regard to data quality, infrastructure complexity and performance, but at least these tools deliver an affordable (short-term) opportunity.

It’s easy to criticize, but where is the solution? Where is the affordable and easily maintainable (out-of-the-box) BI solution for SME (MKB) organizations?

With the current technological possibilities it should be possible to create such a solution. Perhaps some new insights need to be added to the current BI architecture views, but all BI consultants, myself including, currently criticizing (new) BI tooling, should stop complaining and start reinventing. Now is as good a time as ever.