Centralize Your Business Intelligence Initiatives

"Start small." It's the standard advice offered for big IT initiatives, the assumption being that incremental successes will lead more business units to buy into technologies that have proved wise investments for other departments.
What these advisers often fail to mention is that enterprises may already have several groups running around making overlapping "small investments." That's how many business intelligence deployments gain steam: A competitor launches a loyalty campaign, so your sales group reacts by commencing a BI project to initiate its own program. Next, manufacturing catches wind of a competitor's supply chain project, and before long it's purchased a data warehouse and optimization application. Toss in an acquisition or two, and the collection of "small" BI approaches and technologies can get really messy.
Source: Information Week, http://www.informationweek.com