Business intelligence (BI) has been with us for years now, and, we would argue, not much has changed. Advances in the consumer communications and the entertainment world have dwarfed commercial software applications. Consumers have unprecedented access to information and tools with which to consume information. Social media, mobile access, augmented reality and 3D views of pictures and video have blurred the lines between our private and work personas and have fundamentally changed the way the consumer utilizes information. Conversely, BI has seemed to lack in any real innovation.
Business intelligence is a management strategy used to create a more structured and effective approach to decision making. The cornerstone of this “fact-based” decisioning framework is technology that allows us to access, analyze and present information. BI includes those common elements of reporting, querying, OLAP, dashboards, scorecards and even analytics. The umbrella term “BI” also can refer to the processes of acquiring, cleansing, integrating and storing data. Terms such as master data management (MDM), data quality, data enrichment and, the ever present, data warehouse, data mart and operational data store all fit somewhat neatly into this package we call BI.
This focus on technology is part of the problem. Take look at most BI vendor web sites: they describe their technology as the differentiator. The secret sauce that makes them yummier than others is their ability to integrate with other technologies, the way they compress data, and the speed with which their hash algorithms slice through data or their new rich graphics and keeping up with Tufte and Few’s mandates for information visualization.
BI 2.0
While there are precious few references that paint a vision for the future of business intelligence, there have been some authors that describe BI 2.0 using the following terms:
• Proactive alerts and notifications
• Event driven/ real time/ instant access to information
• Advanced analytics
• Enterprise Integration
• Mashups and portal integration
• Mobile/ Ubiquitous access
• Improved visualization, Rich Interfaces (RIA)
• BI as a service (SOA and SaaS)
• In-memory analytics
and even Open Source BI Instead of characterizing features that evolve current state, let us take a lesson from Star Trek and create the future of BI in our imaginations. We’ll do that by exploring what we can learn from the web, social media and entertainment.