COTS Vs. Home-Grown BI Apps
Wanted to run the following two questions and my answers by the community:
Q. What is the average age of reporting applications at large enterprises?
A. Reporting apps typically involve source data integration, data models, metrics, reports, dashboards, and queries. I'd rate the longevity of these in descending order (data sources being most stable and queries changing all the time).
Q. What is the percentage of reporting applications that are homegrown versus custom built?
A. These are by no means solid data points but rather my off-the-cuff – albeit educated – guesses:
- The majority (let's say >50%) of reports are still being built in Excel and Access.
- Very few (let's say <10%) are done in non-BI-specific environments (programming languages).
- The other 40% I'd split 50/50 between:
- off-the-shelf reports and dashboards built into ERP or BI apps,
- and custom-coded in BI tools
Needless to say, this differs greatly by industry and business domain. Thoughts?