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There are various BI tools in the market but the applications built with them are home grown systems which are built from ground up. It takes months, in some cases years, to build the system and the results become visible only after substantial investment. In some cases the system built after such an effort has been successful while in other cases was found to be far off from what was expected.

This is because the solution gets built with poor methodology, partial knowledge of technology, lack of thought leadership and without applying any vision and innovativeness which are key factors for any successful product  development. In some companies, self-interest getting a higher preference over company’s interest also contributes to this. Going by the book does not work either because what is written in the book does not apply to every scenario and hence the solution that is built becomes ineffective even if the technology is available to build an effective solution. An improperly built solution results in disintegration of data, frequent data issues, different versions of the truth and multiple reports to answer each business question. The system works as a mere data extraction tool rather than a system with intelligence built-in.

These kind of solutions impose limitations on what can be achieved from the technology and reduces efficiency of the business.Enormous amount of time has to be spent on validating data frequently, compiling various reports together to get what you need and maintaining more content than necessary. It also increases the cost of the company as more manpower is required to handle the amount of work. The instability and ineffectiveness of the system makes it high maintenance which slows down addition of further content and features depriving the business of what they need to run the show.

The substantial amount of investment and the non-availability of proper resources discourages the companies to re-design the system and the continuation of such systems causes disturbances between IT and the business with both blaming each other.The choices in these situations is either to get the system re-designed by experts or to implement a system already built-in which performs to the required standards. Though both of these can provide proper results, the decision to make a choice between the two depends on the extent of the problem, the size of the solution and the availability of skilled resources.  The former approach is preferable in smaller magnitudes and the latter approach in larger.