Earlier this week I was driving home from work listening to the radio. It was around 6 P.M. so I was waiting for the six o’clock news while absently listening to the commercials in the background. One of the commercials caught my ear. The narrator asked us the listeners the following question: How is the performance of your network?  What would your first reaction be to such a question? I bet you were thinking about some kind of telecommunications service product with circuits and packets. Is this where we separate the geeks from the rest? The first thing I think about when I hear network is People. Or better even stakeholders (mind you that is much broader term than shareholders).  So this question about network performance made me wonder.  How can my stakeholders help me improve my performance?  The answer of course would be by sharing relevant information. This raises a bunch of other questions, such as:How would they know what is relevant to me?How can I even know what is relevant to me?Why would they share information in the first place (what’s in it for them)? If you look at the traditional knowledge pyramid – data, information, knowledge, action – one of the answers could be just to share data and let the recipient transform this further. Let them filter for relevance. This would allow for a SOA like architecture where data is provided in the form of messages and the BI solution just ‘mashes this up’. The benefit would be that the senders would expect the same in return. This is a relatively straightforward business model that has been around since EDI. At the same time we see a major trend which I labeled “increase”. We see an increase in (volume of) data, an increase in the speed we want to consume this data (even real time) and an increase in the impact of business decisions. We want smart and relevant decisions now! Not after we have loaded the data in our datawarehouses or datamarts. Not after we viewed it using reports or cubes. Not after we have come to some decision based on our implicit knowledge. This would allow for a architecture where no longer the data is provided but where decision is provided. The relevancy is determined by smart algorithms,  business rules or some other smart solution. Obviously this is more difficult but it would help me improve my performance. But what would be the benefit for the sender? Probably they will charge me money for adding analysis and actions on top of this data. So what do you think? Are we going towards a business model where information brokers are collecting data, making analyses and supplying decisions and actions to their clients (in fact take BI outside your company) or do we stick to the traditional model (where BI resides inside your company)?

I was watching this video and it made me wonder. Is BI about supplying the data or coming up with the right answers?

 Just watch this and decide for yourself where the wrong is. Is it in the data or in the decision that is based on the data? http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f7fdce5e16/youre-fired-from-jstancari

If the answer is: “in the decision” do we really want BI tools that have more decisions support features or should we stick to tacit knowledge only.