The Tower of Babel Was Built from the Ground Up (and Therein Lies the Problem): An Alternative View of BI

by Victor Rosenberg, Donna Fitzgerald

When we read Ken Collier's call for papers, its explicit portrayal of BI as a bottom-up process of applying esoteric modeling techniques to delineated data amused us. While BI has included such activities, we always saw executives treating them as subactivities -- much like opinion research, economic forecasting, financial modeling, and the like. The BI stars we know are not data-centric wonks but highly creative, social, and politic players.