No DM Group Is an Island Unto Itself

Business intelligence practices—and the data management groups charged with overseeing them—are by no means independent of the enterprise IT main.

If John Donne were alive today and working in an enterprise data center (instead of, for example, dean-ing it up at St. Paul’s), he might choose to recast his “Meditation XVII” in more topical terms: to wit, No business intelligence (BI) practice (or data management group, for that matter) is an island unto itself.

Okay: maybe he wouldn’t, but the lesson remains: BI practices, and the data management groups charged with overseeing them, are by no means independent of the rest of the enterprise IT main.

That’s why recent research from consulting giant Gartner Inc. seems especially apposite. Gartner started by identifying five application integration trends that it says are changing business applications, but the market watcher’s real takeaway was a piece of advice—namely, that managers must not make the mistake of underestimating the extent of the changes occurring in their application architectures even if they are gradual and, in some cases, unintentional.

Read the complete article by Stephen Swoyer on Enterprise Systems.