“Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.”...
Business Intelligence has been transformed into considerably, a chart besides highlights major transformation points.
Business Intelligence Trends
- BI standardization -While BI has been deployed departmentally, IT organizations are driving enterprise BI standards
- BI to the masses -Deploying BI to the “corporate middle class” has started
- BI meets applications and processes -Analytic tools, application package, and integration worlds continue to collide
- Predictive and applied “inline” analytics -IT executives will put a bigger focus on predicting and integrating analytic solutions to solve business problems at the point of interaction instead of providing retrospective analysis
Business Intelligence Continuum: On the Way to Pervasive BI
“How do we get to pervasive BI?” To answer, it’s important to assess where you are along the BI continuum. Many companies are already using BI to measure and drive decisions within their organizations. During the past two or three years, many organizations have adopted CPM/EPM and leveraged the integration with their BI platforms to drive alignment between strategy and execution. The expanding role of analytics driving process optimization is being enabled by predictive analytics and data mining, in concert with traditional BI capabilities tightly coupled with business rule engines, to make the insight useful within the process context and needed process decision time frames. The future state will see BI as an augmentation of business processes — human and machine activities will be affected. In this future state, human action is enhanced, modified and even provided with implied reactive and proactive steps within the business environment by BI analysis, which is intimately participating in the continuous evaluation of even distantly related processes. The future worker, spurred by consumer behavior, social connectivity and an arsenal of personal devices, will create a work environment of infinitely varied options. Ninety percent of companies are already lagging behind the thinking and skills of the future worker. During the next five years as BI becomes integrated into applications and tools, more-diverse users (including partners and customers) will leverage the benefits of BI to lead, decide, measure, manage, innovate and optimize performance, and drive business transformation.
Major Drivers and Inhibitors to Pervasive BI
There are several significant enablers and inhibitors in achieving pervasive BI. A BI strategic plan and vision should incorporate the significant enablers. Skills development in the development and use of these technologies should begin now in preparation for future deployments. Additionally, organizations must address the inhibitors in their planning cycles, because they can significantly slow the successful adoption of BI in general.
Drivers include:
Consumerization of use of information: High expectation of ability to use and access.
Standardization/commoditization: Basic BI platform functionality (that is, reporting, query, dashboards) broadly available within the enterprise and “good enough.”
Modularization: BI functionality becomes more componentized and service-oriented. Users and developers can more easily customize. Users can add value in pursuit of self-interest.
Networked collaboration: Fosters environment of innovation and contribution. Ability to easily share and manage user insights and contributions across wide numbers of users and applications (not just internally, either).
Inhibitors include:
Skills: Lack of best practices and methodologies to manage a complex and pervasive set of BI capabilities. Users can’t understand the analysis and correctly interpret the results.
Stability and flexibility of business processes: Low process maturity. Lack of closed-loop process management.
Silo think: Of infrastructure, applications, definitions, rules, calculations and so on. “Not invented here” (NIH) syndrome.
Spreadsheet as information systems “duct tape.”
Sponsorship: Limited vision and perceived business value/impact.
