Is Business Intelligence used efficiently?

Almost all companies today have a data warehouse and some sort of business intelligence platform. But the fact remains that many don't know how to make the best out of their data warehouse and business Intelligence platforms. The problem is many fold.

IT teams inability to understand the Business needs: Many IT personnel supporting a data warehouse are too technology centric. They fail to understand the business needs completely. Once a data warehouse is in place, the supporting members have little or no knowledge of business requirements, only technical aspect of it. This will not enable them to provide the support the business needs. Most often business is frustrated with this gap in understanding and complain about the inefficiency of IT personnel.

Business teams inability to explain what they want: The business teams many times don't really explain what they want, clearly. More often the questions are too generic like, "I need revenue information every month". Once some revenue number is provided by IT, they ask for more detailed report. At this point, the data warehouse team that does not have a good foresight would fail to provide the information the business asks. The business needs to be very particular about what they want at the most granular level and leave no ambiguity for the data warehouse team.

The Gap between IT and Business: There is a huge gap between business and IT in many organizations. The successful companies have bridged the gap. Coincidentally, I was reading an article on TDWI "Bridging the IT/Business Culture Chasm" by Hugh J. Watson in which he mentions, the companies that successfully utilized Business Intelligence are the ones that had Business Analysts with technical abilities. He also mentions that the companies with successful decision support systems had data warehouse personnel, who at some point in their career worked on the business side and had the ability to bridge the gap.

To conclude, a company can have a successful utilization of the business intelligence only when there is an overlap in the Business and IT teams. I believe that many companies have recognized this and seeking to bridge the gap for better use of their data.