Omniture and the Business Intelligence - Web Analytics divide

At the TDWI
Summit this week, I had the opportunity to talk about Web Analytics with
enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) execs. I came away concluding that the
worlds of enterprise data and web metrics still remain far apart.
I've argued before that the separation is partly technical and partly cultural.
BI managers are wary of the firehouse of web traffic data, and most web managers
just don't think much about non-web data stores and the value of website metrics
to the broader enterprise.
Chatting with a BI manager at a major Omniture
customer highlighted some of the issues. As Web
Analytics Report readers know, Omniture is good at getting data into
its system, but not very friendly about getting it out. Now, this customer wanted
a small subset of key web data to bring back into their data warehouse. The
key word here is small: you don't necessarily need and in fact can't
handle all that extra traffic data for CRM-oriented enterprise datamarts. But
you do want to know what your customers are doing. So, this enterprise put their
own unique tag on key transaction pages (downloads, inquiries, and other form
submissions) that wrote to a separate database, which they could then synch
up with their master customer data to get a more holistic view. It's a useful
work-around that seems to be working well for the BI team there.
At the same time, it made me a bit uncomfortable, because now they run two
different tracking systems -- Omniture and the bespoke capture application --
and experience suggests that they will generate different metrics. The web managers
will make decisions based on what they see coming out of Omniture, while the
master enterprise data may show something different.
That's not the end of the world -- at least this customer actually made an
effort to extract some web data for long-term enterprise use -- it's really
just a first step.
Before you start to criticize Omniture, understand that no web analytics tool
has been built to integrate with enterprise BI systems (indeed, the free Google
Analytics service has no data access API at all). I think the marketplace
still reflects the fact that within most enterprises, web managers and enterprise
data managers live in two different worlds. But, if like the customer I met,
you are trying to bridge that gap, be prepared for some custom development.