The beginning of the year is always a period to look back but even more important to look forward. On the radio I hear a lot of commercials from different training institutes urging people to add their specific course, study or lecture to their 2008 curriculum. I expect that employees are now running towards their management requesting training in new features of tool XYZ and so on. Business Intelligence (BI) is a field of study that has been dominated by a strong technical driven focus. Business Intelligence supports better decisions, by making a strategy, objective or process – accountable, adjustable or adaptive. Shapiro has developed a knowledge management pyramid with three layers: data, information and knowledge. Unlocking data and transforming this into information will lead to more knowledge and insight. Professor Weggeman defines knowledge as: Information * Experience and Attitude (K=I * EVA). He states that hard facts, information or explicit knowledge can only lead to benefits when combined with implicit or tacit knowledge. Only when something is done with the information, such as sharing, comparing or merging with something else will lead to performance improvement. Choo adds another element to the mix. On top of explicit and tacit knowledge he adds cultural knowledge. Those are the beliefs and values that exist within an organization. Therefore it is safe to conclude that when it concerns performance improvement or strategy alignment the real barriers are: communication, culture and change management. BI from a technical point of view is just an enabler. So why is our community still so much focused on technology. Why is it that instead of subscribing to for example a course in business spirituality we choose the “database administration 2.1” or “Advanced SQL 3.2”?

Perhaps you can find some inspiration in these lyrics: http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/supertramp/school.html

Times they are changing. Last year has been tumultuous for BI at best. We have seen the BI market consolidate into a few remaining mega vendors. But there was also room for niche players especially the ones focusing on speed, visualization or collaboration. So what will 2008 bring? To quote from Star Wars: “Impossible to see the future is”. But let’s give a try anyway. There are five mega trends that I foresee. Some have been around for quite some time and some are new. The first one is called: (1) Increase: Business Intelligence must be able to cope with considerable increase in both data (size) and speed (real time). The second one is (2) Integration: Business Intelligence will continue to integrate with operational processes but will also be more aligned with strategy. The integration of (un)structured data will increase. Finally, Business Intelligence will integrate with other business applications or ERP systems. Third, and my personal favorite, is (3) Insight: Business Intelligence will continue to become more intuitive (less end user involvement) showing an increase in advanced visualizations but also more analytic (more end user involvement).The fourth is (4) Interactive: Business Intelligence will be more reciprocal by nature; creating a dialogue between system and end users as well as sharing information and collaborating within performance networks. Finally, number five will be (5) Industrialization: Business Intelligence development will be characterized by a more industrialized approach using standard development frameworks opening up the possibility to outsource.  Increase will be mostly characterized by the need for real time information (partly due to the fact that BI becomes more operational). This will be supported by tools like Netezza and Teradata. They can also support the growing process of data retrieval from vast amounts of data. Integration of unstructured data (text, search, documents, agents) for example in a document warehouse (using tags) sitting next to the data warehouse will be the wave of the future. I expect Google or Attunity to take the lead here but the original BI vendors (Cognos, BusinessObjects) have also been investing in this. Although the market is more or less divided among a few remaining vendors it is still possible that we will see some more integration. This will be partly triggered by the fact that BI will be used on all levels: strategic, tactical and operational. This means BI tooling must support strategy development as well as pervasive BI (it’s everywhere). The renewed interest in open source Business Intelligence (Pentaho, Jaspersoft) is a clear counter reaction against the market domination due to vendor consolidation. Creating Insight today will be the one mega trend where I expect the most innovation to come from. It is a hot topic and fun to watch evolve. Here you will find things like intuitive intelligence (Strategy companion) or decision engines supporting your daily work (Fair Isaac). Also advanced visualization will help the end user get more grip (fractal edge) on things. Triggered by the success of “competing on analytics” or “super crunchers” we will see an rise in the use of analytics, strongly combining informatics, statistics and business knowledge. Perhaps here lies the opportunity for the long awaited promise of data mining? A clear and much appraised trend is the sharing of information with other people either inside or outside your own company to create mutual benefit. But it is more than just sharing the information it is also about sharing the reasoning behind it. How have we come to this conclusion and do you agree? It is asking feedback or contributions to your problem solving by your stake holders. All the characteristics of the web 2.0 can also apply here. This can also be done by using a trusted third party to solve your BI wishes by providing BI as a service. As BI is getting more mature by the minute I expect that we will see a standardization of best practices resulting in an industrialized approach in (standard) BI development. BI factories, often based in typical outsourcing countries, can provide high quality, low cost ready-to-use BI solutions. Some people say that after all the consolidating this will be a boring year for Business Intelligence. But if I look at these five mega trends I can’t wait. Happy new Year.   

Detailed insight into crucial data and events is a necessity for organizations that want to navigate a constantly changing, information-rich environment. Intelligent organizations are constantly reading, analyzing and reacting to information inside and far outside the companies’ boundaries. Information thus becomes a corporate asset, which infuses itself into all strategic and operational parts of the business. Traditionally BI enables business decisions through information access, by delivering the right information, at the right time, in the right way. However nowadays BI does much more than then decision making. It also monitors and supports, among other things, crucial business processes and is much more then ever embedded into daily business. Therefore it can be said that BI is crucial for the strategic, tactical but also the operational needs of an organization. Many companies have service level agreements (SLA) between (mostly internal) parties to formalize the process of data delivery or extraction from data sources and/or the publication of information to business stakeholders. With a traditional focus on decision making or decision support only those SLA have been created with just that scope in mind. This has resulted into a situation where a problem with data delivery or information publication had to be resolved within for example a timeframe of 24 hours or even more. In other words, due to it’s reactive or even reflective nature, the repair of the BI problems have not been the highest priority for many organizations. This makes sense if you compare this to critical business applications such as cash registers or ATM for banking. They support the crucial daily operation and should get top priority. But with the changing nature of BI, becoming more operational and supporting real time business processes, it is time to redraw the SLA and giving (almost) top priority to BI systems as well.