Being the CEO of a product company that earns its living in the grey area between IT Service Management and Business Intelligence, I’m constantly looking for BI solutions that make life easier for the Service Management community.

But what does that mean: BI solutions that make life easier! Are customers looking for more out of the box reports, KPIs, analytics or for more functionalities within the BI tool? Or should the focus be on the back end of the BI architecture: the ETL layer and database? Of course, the answer is: both. However, looking at the number one priority according to “Gartner’s - 2009 CIO Agenda: improving business processes”, I’m convinced that in this economical downturn customers are most helped by making the back end as out of the box as possible.

The focus that I will have in my blogs is on the balance between adding value by improving the front end of a BI solution and the back end. Westbury’s focus has always been on making the BI solution for Service Management out of the box and to stay away from a datawarehouse architecture in which the dependency on SQL specialists and database developers is time consuming and expensive. But, again, what should be the right balance between out of the box capabilities for the front end of a BI solution and the back end? Does the CIO really care about the back end or is he or she only interested in the end results? Again, according to Gartner the focus of CIO’s will shift in 2009 to a more process oriented approach.

Keep you posted.

Floris