Cost Of Business Intelligence

SAP brought out a paper about reducing the cost of business intelligence (BI). Two of their five recommendations explicitly cite the use of standards and a third – promoting shared services – implies standardization too.

I wonder if priorities have gotten switched somehow along the way here. I can't see how you get much value from BI unless you apply data standards first. Without standards, people struggle to get coherent, meaningful information from their data. I can well imaging BI costs ballooning if an organization attempts to do any interesting analysis atop a mess of disparate data. See SAP