The need for business intelligence is evident, but most business organizations still don't have the information or insights needed to improve their decision making. The debate rages on: has IT been delivering BI effectively or does the responsibility lie within business?
Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce costs and resources in IT has impacted many organizations' ability to dedicate further attention to BI. The reality is that each organization will have to determine how IT should prioritize budgets and resources for BI and how to respond to this growing need. Business knows the problems quite well, and limitations of existing BI efforts has proliferated further spreadsheet use. And as we all know, the copy and paste function of spreadsheets leads to inaccuracy and hampers quality decision-making.
We are seeing organizations that were previously handcuffed by IT inaction and lack of focus on BI now turning to software as a service as a new method to gain access to the software and their data. The combination of BI and SaaS introduces the concept of "BI as a Service" that can complement or be an alternative way of accelerating BI in an organization.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com