Mainstream Business Intelligence
With last year’s vendor consolidation and the appearance of several smaller BI upstarts, one could conclude that Business Intelligence is now a mainstream enterprise technology. However, James Taylor of Smart Enough Systems makes a point to the contrary: advanced BI functionality, such as visualization, in-memory analytics and search, make BI more palatable, but do not make the technology mainstream. To make BI mainstream is to get information into the hands of those who need it, and then take it a step further with business rules, predictive analytics and decision services.
“…it must focus analytic insight on the making of decisions in software not just in people’s heads.”
It must first begin with a shift into thinking about operational BI. There must first be a level of comfort with delivering BI reports and dashboards that are timely, accurate and useful. Then, with careful analysis of the business processes, improve upon those reports to automate any decision making as much as possible. It requires a strict alignment of BI reporting with business goals and metrics.
