When Your BI Software Has a Breakdown

Mark J

Updated · May 28, 2010

Life sciences instrument maker, Beckman Coulter, publicly disclosed the company’s trip into a BI rabbit hole, and subsequent escape, at the April 2010 Business Intelligence Summit organized by research firm Gartner. According to this report on Datamation, Beckman has $3.3 billion in annual revenues and 12,400 employees, but beginning in 2001 it created a business intelligence software monster appropriate for a company 10 times its size.


“In more than 15 years of interviewing senior executives about their business intelligence software implementations, I can’t recall hearing about a more badly mangled environment than the tale I am about to tell. And I can’t recall meeting a more candid IT executive than Dawn Conant, director of business intelligence at Beckman Coulter, life sciences instrument maker.
Conant publicly disclosed the company’s trip into a BI rabbit hole, and subsequent escape, at the April 2010 Business Intelligence Summit organized by research firm Gartner.
“Conant and a team of 120 people (divided equally among IT, business, and consultants) implemented a powerful business intelligence software environment complete with validated and authenticated data, providing important insights about product profitability by region, customer, or other metric.”

Read the Full Business Intelligence Software Story at Datamation

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