If a little bit of something is good, more must be better.  This is true of some things - exercise, community service, patience, etc.  Well, it's true to a degree.  What about business intelligence?  Almost all businesses have the proverbial business intelligence user community now.  Though sometimes fragmented and informal, the IT organizations supporting these communities are planning to expand their reach and their community.  In most cases, this is completely warranted.  Most organizations are not at the point of diminishing returns with their user community rollout.

Remember the first Inmon definition of data warehousing? "a subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile, time-variant collection of data, organized to support management needs."  It's a solid definition that has stood the test of time.  I know it's for data warehousing, not business intelligence, but you can see the mentality of the management user there and no mention of the rest of the organization.  Of course, BI has all kinds of users - people and systems - now.  And organizations are better off for it.

However, the so-called Pervasive BI movement goes beyond any of this.  It's "BI for everyone."  Unlike my thoughts on self-service BI, I am less optimistic about pervasive BI in the short term.  I'm all for smarter organizations, but not many workforces are structured such that everyone, or even most, employees have impressive key business decisions to make that incorporate the need for interaction with data well beyond their immediate environment.  I can think of a few exceptions - financial research firms, pharmaceutical research, etc. 

Probably the key thing to find palatable ground here is to define user.  Everyone in an organization can be the beneficiary of BI in the organization.  However, the tiered nature of the user community will remain true for the next decade.  Some will:

1.       Mine the data

2.       Interact with the data

3.       Consume and interact with reports

4.       Consume reports for decision making

5.       Make tactical decisions for others based on information seen in a report

6.       Make small adjustments to their team's workdays based on information seen in a report

7.       Make tactical decisions based on information seen in a report

8.       Make small adjustments to their workday based on information seen in a report

At some point in this hierarchy, the need for actual BI tools stop.  So, if you have a project that will entail a large number of new BI users - and they're going to productively benefit the business through the knowledge they gain from being a user - that is great.  If you are displaying corporate KPIs throughout the organization, I can see that.  If the culture that arises from this sharing, and possibly decomposing the KPIs to multiple levels, is empowering everyone to do their best job, that too is great.  But that's not BI for everyone.

Let your organization benefit from BI.  However, a project to blanket the business with BI tools in an untargeted fashion because it is thought that [pervasive BI is good, it means everyone needs BI and BI means tools] is not the best use of resources.