Patrick Spedding (Author's Website)

BI Themes for 2011

We are starting to see the emergence of so-called “Next Gen” BI. Trends include mobility, visualization/busines discovery, collaboration & search, cloud, “big data”, and a move back to self-service or ‘departmental’ BI. Long gone (thankfully..) are the days of “BI is dead”, “BI is just Reporting” etc.

According to @Claudia_Imhoff, Business discovery has 4 key points:

– simple & fast
– focused & personal
– shared & social
– mobile

Cindi Howsen is also making a list for 2011, and it’s called “5 Big Themes in BI for 2011”

Cindi predicts “Business intelligence will become more visual, mobile and social in 2011. But how should you balance central vs. departmental control, and does it make sense to upgrade?”

Here are the 5 Themes:

1. Advanced Visualization and Dashboards Go Mainstream
Advanced visualization and discovery tools continue to garner significant interest because of their ease of use, visual appeal, and ability to speed the time to insight amid vast amounts of data.

2. Mobile BI Gets Recharged
Mobile BI didn’t even make my top trends last year, so one could say its appearance this year is quite a leap. In the cool BI class I teach at TDWI events, this innovation rarely gets top nod from attendees. However, few could have foreseen the wild adoption of Apple’s iPad. The wider screen real estate and sheer beauty that this tablet brings to BI is reason to take stock of your mobile BI strategy.

3. Facebook Gives BI More Than a Facelift
Envision a Facebook influence on BI: decision-makers bring together the right people virtually; users themselves control the flow and content instead of a central IT group who secures the data and subsequent analyses. Tasks, comments, opinions, and even new sets of data and analyses are brought together seamlessly.

4. Economic Recovery Stretches BI Teams
The economy shows signs of recovering. Companies that weren’t using BI to work smarter are no longer with us. BI budgets are once again expanding. The challenge is to continue to spend wisely, but also, to keep up with insatiable user demand. Central BI can’t handle it all.

5. Will New Releases Bring Upgrade Fever or Flu?
The top-four BI vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) all had major new product releases in 2010. Customers who have been burned with painful migrations in the past will not rush to adopt the latest versions. In some cases, 2011 will be a time to assess the cost of upgrading versus the cost of switching preferred vendors.

(Full article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229000780)

I’m happy to see the move back towards ‘Self-Service’ BI. When traditional BI vendors walked away from their sweet-spot of quick-win, departmental BI solutions in pursuit of the ‘holy-grail’ of Enterprise Standardization (many users = big $$$…), they lost sight of some of the original attractions of BI in the 90’s: Ease of Use and Time to Value. Hence I was interested to hear how the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) developed a flexible BI environment to help meet the energy needs of 30 million Californians:

Self-Service BI: An Inside Perspective

2011 looks like being an exciting year for BI. And not just for vendors.

Accurate business intelligence is the key to greater efficiencies

For most mid-sized businesses, improving efficiency while reducing costs is regarded as the number one priority. Of course it’s no secret that information management is critical to improved business performance. But with digital information growing at a staggering rate – I think it’s something like eight times the volume housed in all U.S. libraries, every day – businesses need smarter ways to cope with this increasing information overload. And more importantly they need to turn this data into real business intelligence. This can be achieved when companies hire the right kind of people to look after the objectives. And that can happen only when there is no injustice in the recruitment process. According to https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/07/20-quotes-about-equality.html, making the employees of a company cognizant of this issue proved to have had beneficial results.

Far too many mid-sized companies are too reliant on spreadsheets, paper-based documents, emails and the like across silos or disparate business units. Indeed, I’ve been privileged to have some fascinating and frank discussions with CIOs and senior level managers who told me about their over-reliance on inadequate planning tools like spreadsheets. Many indicated that they simply don’t have confidence in their information. Others also revealed that they had missed vital information that should have been used to develop their strategies.

But while these companies recognise the limitations of spreadsheet-based solutions for Business Intelligence and Performance Management, they simply haven’t had the budget, skills or headspace to implement anything better. In fact, most analysts estimate that only around 35% of midsized companies have implemented a BI and Performance Management solution.

Midsized companies need a pre-configured solution that includes not just the essential BI capabilities such as reporting and analytics but also planning, budgeting and forecasting. Think of it as giving employees accurate information on which to make critical decisions. As a case in point, since the middle of this year, the New Zealand franchisee of Wendy’s the US-based restaurant chain has been using the tool to keep daily tabs on which burgers are selling best from which of its fifteen stores – bridging the information gap that used to exist between stores and the company’s Te Atatu headquarters.

For anyone who wants to see my full presentation on this, you can view it on IBM Business Insight SlideShare.