Irving Tyler, Vice President and CIO of Quaker Chemical Corporation, offered a democratized model of BI.  “I have a problem with companies who think you have to be PHD Statistician to do this well.  Every individual in a company is already making decisions and in most case making good decisions.  So giving them better tools, better information, can only improve that and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make small but important incremental improvements.“  

Taylor says the application of BI is about understanding your business model and doing what is relevant to that model.  Bossidy in Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done discusses this simple formula that is not easy to execute.   BI could be looked at as a specialization by specialized groups of people, and that might be appropriate for one business model, but nothing about BI compels it to be one way or another.

Taylor is careful not to privilege analytics in the process of decision-making.   “To prosecute a business you want to promote experiential knowledge and learning and you want people to make better decisions based upon that and structured information is certainly an important component of that but it cannot drive it.  It cannot make it so.” 

For Taylor it is hard to talk about BI without talking about collaboration and knowledge management, “what good is structured information if you don’t apply it in an experiential fashion otherwise it’s just print on paper.  These things should be complimentary, not mutually exclusive.  It doesn’t mean one aspect of that is wrong or not.  It means how do you combine those things to become the most effective manager, leader, that you can possible be.”

Jim Davis, Senior Vice President Chief Marketing Officer of SAS, says two things are happening. “We need to push out information to the greatest number of users in an organization and create a culture that bases strategy on fact-based decisioning.”   To bridge these priorities he prescribes the Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC), as referred to in the Information Revolution and elaborated in his upcoming book, Business Intelligence Competency Centers.

A BICC provides a central location and collective memory for driving and supporting an organizations overall information strategy.  It coordinates current efforts and ensures that information and best practices are communicated and share throughout the entire organization so everyone can benefit from success and lessons learned.   This supports a democratized BI culture as it aligns a shared version of the truth.  It also faces the reality that all minds are not created equal (in terms of analytic prowess) regardless of the business model.