The Death and Resurrection of Business Intelligence

We’re seeing the death and resurrection of many big entities these days: the global economy, banks, financial service, insurance, and automotive companies. Now, we can even add business intelligence (BI) to the list.

Business Intelligence is definitely “in play.” It topped the wish list of 2,500 CIOs surveyed by IBM this year, was high on the priority list of InformationWeek 500 companies with more than $250 million in revenue, and large vendors such as IBM are introducing new products for midsize companies, the fastest growing segment of the BI market.

With all of this focus on BI, it appears that BI is alive and well. Not so, according to Dan Woods’ article, “The Death of Business Intelligence,” published on Forbes.com. In the article, Woods points out that there are technologies available that can provide multi-touch-screen access to real-time reports about virtually any question. He cites CNN coverage of the presidential election as an example.  Gone are the days of deciding in advance which questions need to be answered, and then waiting to receive the reports. Real-time operational intelligence will eventually replace business intelligence, according to Woods.

InformationWeek also recently published a cover-story article by Doug Henschen about next-generation BI, and the four technologies that are re-shaping it: predictive analytics, real-time performance monitoring, in-memory BI for faster analysis, and software as a service.

Between the extremes of traditional, costly, and time-consuming on-premises business intelligence systems, and the BI utopia that Dan Woods wrote about, software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI provides a current, practical solution to making business intelligence available to more users, quickly and cost effectively. Furthermore, enterprise mashup dashboards provide a way to visualize data from any web-facing source within minutes. SaaS BI and enterprise mashup dashboards provide affordable, current alternatives to real-time operational intelligence and multi-touch-screen interfaces that only large enterprises can currently afford.

To learn more about the “death” of on-premises BI, its “resurrection” in the cloud, and some points to consider while evaluating and implementing SaaS BI solutions, see William Laurent’s article, “Business Intelligence in the Cloud,” published on Dashboard Insight.

Does your organization plan to implement any of the new BI technologies such as SaaS BI, predictive analytics, real-time performance monitoring, or in-memory BI?