Business Intelligence Mega Trends 2008
Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 16 of January , 2008 at 8:56 am
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)
Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
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Comment by James Taylor
Made Wednesday, 16 of January , 2008 at 7:12 pm
An interesting set of trends. The Integration, Insight and Industrialization trends are going to be a challenge for those that think BI means reporting and OLAP. Integrating insight into high-performance operational systems on an industrial scale takes a different approach. You need to use business rules and executable analytics, not reporting tools and queries, to deliver on this promise.
JT
James Taylor
Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems
Blog at www.smartenoughsystems.com/wp
Pingback by links for 2008-01-17 | Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog
Made Thursday, 17 of January , 2008 at 9:32 am
[…] Business Intelligence Mega-Trends Interesting set of 5 trends all beginning with I. Several of them reinforce the value of extending an old-style BI approach to include EDM. (tags: BI 2.0 trends edm) […]
Comment by Dave Dixon
Made Thursday, 17 of January , 2008 at 8:01 pm
Nice analysis. Allow me to put my own spin:
1) The bottleneck in dealing with information (whether you’re talking about volume or speed) is not technology, but the person in the loop. People are poor at assessing a lot of info, instead they tend to pick a couple of things that seem like “big hitters” and place too much emphasis there. That choice is usually arbitrary, and the more choices available, the slower decisions get made. The solution is to allow the computer to value available choices given the available information, i.e. to build decision models. People are then freed to do what they do best (be creative) while the computer does what it is best at (quickly process lots of information). Blogged about it here: http://blog.provisdom.com/?p=32.
2) The only way BI can be more aligned with strategy is if you can value information as it impacts the strategy. The only way you can value the impact of information on strategy is if the strategy is chosen to maximize a goal that has a well-defined value. You might say your goal is to build the “best” product, but unless you can quantify “best” in dollars and cents, it’s hard to place a value on the associated information. Ultimately, the only goal of a public corporation is to maximize shareholder value, so such alignment requires that you can measure the change in shareholder value brought about by some information in the context of relevant decisions. Here’s a case study discussing the value of information in the context of petroleum production: http://blog.provisdom.com/?p=27.
3) I agree that BI needs to be more intuitive, but that intuition should operate at the strategic level, rather than at the level of “understanding” vast amounts of interrelated data. Visualizations and analytics have a place, but I believe it mostly to be one of informing decision-makers of possible choices, e.g. market segmentation provides you choices of segments which you can market too, information about what sort of marketing strategy will be effective in each, etc. But no analytics or visualizations will ever allow you to get your head around all of the available data without losing information (oversimplifying). Such information loss incurs a corresponding loss in shareholder value. And providing data in real-time doesn’t necessarily mean people can make effective decisions more quickly; it just swamps them in more information. Again, the actual process of valuing choices given information is best done via modeling (http://blog.provisdom.com/?p=26). The computer should be able to provide decisions in real time, given data supplied in real time. The role of the human is to ensure that the available choices and information continue to be relevant, make sense in an ever-changing business environment, etc.
(4) and (5) I pretty much agree with, though again both items must be done in the context of making decisions which maximize shareholder value.
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