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The Future of BI: End-User Enablement

The focus of the business intelligence (BI) industry has been on collecting data and reporting facts. Since BI started on the data collection side, solutions have largely been sold to IT, who deploys them on behalf of management, usually with little understanding of management's decision-making needs or key issues and questions. As a result, current solutions have evolved into complicated toolkits that work well for some problems dealing with "what" and "how much" (e.g., "how many of widget A did I sell last month?"), but not those requiring an understanding of "why" and what will happen in the future.

Today it is not uncommon for corporate departments to run hundreds of reports every day that are of little help to executives seeking to use the data to create understanding and make decisions. The result is often a daisy chain of additional report requests and delays in getting answers. When companies turn to the market for assistance, it becomes obvious that there is an enormous gap between reporting programs and very expensive, high-end analytical offerings that require individuals with statistics and/or programming expertise. Consider some recently published facts: 80 percent of users have yet to take advantage of BI.1 Business users rely on countless shadow systems because, despite the official tools and data warehouses, users are not being given what they need.2

Why the lack of use? Why all the shadow systems? Because the current tools are too difficult to use and understand. People put their own data into Excel and run with that, not because they want to, but because it's something they are comfortable with and trust. BI must grow up. It's not about the technology; it's about providing the answers that drive new business or cut costs. Employing an entire department of IT folks to generate reports for executives (as many do!!) is too slow, too difficult and not at all collaborative.

In order to become pervasive, BI will need to do a much better job of empowering users. Dumping reports and scorecards on them doesn't work. Sending business managers to a small team of analysis gurus is nothing more than a bottleneck. Optimizing specific business processes with probabilistic models is not enough - the future of decision-making can't become just "machine driven." People run businesses - so fully effective BI has to help people make better fact-based decisions by leveraging their intuition and learning.

I believe businesspeople can explore data and determine cause and effect quickly and with minimal training. The key is effective and clear display along with interactivity that enables people to explore the information that they are looking at.

Future BI solutions must also make it easy to combine data from multiple sources, and they should employ quantitative mining that helps direct the business manager to find what matters in the context of the business questions he/she is trying to answer, and in the manner in which he/she is used to working.

This leads to new approaches such as in-memory data management (for rapid, interactive analysis), data visualization (promoting understanding by casual users), and predictive analytics (for discovering unexpected relationships) integrated together into very easy-to-use end user-oriented solutions.

This new paradigm can change the way a business organizes and people work together. It is a fundamentally different approach with benefits that move fact-based analysis from the back-office support staff to the front-line decision makers. Consider what users describe - these are users who have tried all the legacy approaches and been frustrated by them:

  • Collaboration: Work through information and discuss ideas together in real time.
  • Information democracy: Everybody can see and understand the data.
  • Discovery: businesspeople can drill into KPIs, find new targets, create new understanding and achieve better focus.
  • Speed: Better decisions in one day than the compromised results we used to get in three weeks.
  • Reorganize to better use IT and analysis staff: They become coaches rather than bottlenecks.
  • Change the way we do business: Faster, more data driven, more collaborative.

This is not a dream. I know from proven results that every businessperson can use BI to make better decisions. This is my vision and a reality the industry is creating every day. Businesspeople can answer questions on their own without relying on IT or power analysts to prepare and interpret results for them. They can be freed from the headaches and complexities of traditional BI platforms. And, these solutions can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively while using the data and infrastructure investment that is already in place.

References:

  1. Kurt Schlegel. "Emerging Trends and Technologies in BI and Data Warehousing." Gartner Inc. March 2007.
  2. Stephen Swoyer. "BI This Week." TDWI. April 2007.

Doug Cogswell is president and CEO of ADVIZOR Solutions. Cogswell has led ADVIZOR Solutions since its spin-off from Lucent Bell Labs in 1999, and has spent the last 10 years growing successful enterprise software companies. He is well connected throughout the software industry and actively participates on a number of boards, including the Chicago Software Association (of which he is Chairman), the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and Opportunity International. Cogswell can be reached at doug.cogswell@advizorsolutions.com.

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