This time of year it’s tempting to sit under a tree and wait for the apple to drop. Aha, a trend! But it’s better to go asking smart people what they think, and Dave Wells—former TDWI education director and now a consultant—is one of the smartest I know.
He says the one-tool-fits-all scenario is going to fade. Instead, how about the right tool on my desktop for me and the right one on your desktop for you? They both draw from the same set of standard data, of course. “As long as we’re both making good business decisions, how significant is [the difference in tools]?”
Among his leading candidates for desktop is Quantrix Modeler. “It’s truly impressive,” he says. For example, it expresses formulas not as cell references it expresses them in business terms. He also likes, among others, Lyza and eThority.
With permission from IT, business users can connect and manipulate data on their own. “If we put the right tools in the right places to support that, it’s a perfect evolution. IT does what it’s good at, and we put the responsibility for business analysis back into the business where it belongs.”
This is all just my first blast at what will help form my trends story for BI This Week, to appear later this month.
