L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas is urging the county to put to an end a 2005 provision that requires it to use one business intelligence platform over all others.
A motion scheduled to be presented by Ridley-Thomas during a supervisors meeting Tuesday says several BI platforms are now on the market that could be useful, a decade after the Board of Supervisors approved its CIO's recommendation to adopt Cognos as the county’s standard for business intelligence and ad-hoc reporting software.
"The County should assess the feasibility of adopting new technologies while considering existing product investments and evolution and continuously explore and evaluate new BI platforms," Ridley-Thomas submitted in the motion.
The resolution directs the county CEO to sunset the Cognos standard and says county departments should be encouraged to use other BI tools that enable "interactive visualization, predictive analytics, dashboards [and] online analytical processing."
Ridley-Thomas named specific solutions, including Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, IBM, Oracle, SAS and SAP.
"With such a wide range of options in the marketplace, it is unnecessary for the County to limit itself to a single proprietary solution or brand," the motion says.
L.A. County maintains an extensive list of "Enterprise IT Standards and Directions" that identify board-adopted standards and county-preferred technologies for operating systems, networks, security, applications and other categories. Exceptions require approval of the county CIO.
