In almost every technology company, if you’re explaining your business model savvy technology executives ask the question:
Who are you selling this too? What’s his/her title, where does he work? What’s the size of their company?
It’s a question that helps the questioner understand, and the responder clarify exactly who is buying the product. This is critical for a business! Is it the System Administrator manager who is looking for his DBAs to coordinate their efforts (groupware for DBAs)? Is it a CRM system that the business users are primarily evaluating for use (salesforce/sugarcrm) but requires huge IT investment for configuration/integration?? For a software or IT services provider, deciding WHO you sell to (Business Users or IT) is hugely important!
Asking this question when that technology or services is in Business Intelligence is just plain useless though. Business Intelligence is always a mix of the two. IT? Sometimes they’re the ones buying, but never without HUGE amounts of time spent with the business side (casual report developers and business analysts). Business Users buying tableau, and coordinating parts of the purchase or data access with IT? Yup. Analysts embedded with business teams buying SAS/SPSS, through an IT purchasing process? Sure thing.
Business Intelligence is always sold to two groups at once which makes it a tricky thing to sell. Anyone reading this, consider how much tension you’ve observed between your IT/Business groups. Trying to get dead in the middle on this is a tricky proposition.
Business Intelligence sales guy earn their money for sure!
BI isn’t one software application, rather it is a multitude of things that accomplish the business intelligence objectives.
And I’ve seen situations where IT and business analysts/administrators go together like oil and water!