14: The Future of BI
(EN: A word of caution: "future of" chapters tend to be horrendous and become increasingly so over time.)
Given that BI is so thinly applied today, there is great potential for growth. In companies that have implemented successful BI solutions, the user base started small and expanded throughout the enterprise, and BI has the potential to be relevant for everyone, not merely information workers and management. However, the spread of BI will depend upon a cultural shift toward the empowerment of individuals and continuing technical innovation.
Predicting the Future
The core of BI, gathering information and performing statistical analysis to derive meaning and develop models for predicting the future, is nothing new. What has changed is the amount of data that can be gathered and the use of information systems to make it available to a large number of users, rather than relegating these tasks to a "back room" staffed by a handful of statisticians.
Also, which it's generally recognized that there is business value in providing business intelligence, it seems unlikely that the practice will become "mainstream" in the near-term, though the intelligence provided by this process may drive everyday decision making processes.
The current trend points to the continued development and automation of truly predictive analytics, rather than merely measuring historical data as a means to guide users in making educated guesses that are only obliquely related to the historical data they are presented, and to the continued exposure of data to more front-line workers.
Emerging Technologies
As part of the author's BI survey, respondents were asked to identify the items in a list of emerging technologies that they believed would be most important in future. Web-based dashboards were rated the highest, with predictive analysis also in the top. It surprised the author that enterprise search and mobile access were selected by only a small percentage of respondents. However, if the results are segmented to focus on business professionals, whose needs are the driving force behind BI, Microsoft Office integration moves to the top of the list.
A separate survey done at an "executive summit" event identified performance management and predictive analytics as the most important developments. There were few (or no) votes for some of the most heavily hyped features, such as enterprise search, dashboards, and rich Internet applications, which was contrary to expectations.
The author concedes that the results may be skewed due to the novelty of BI. The author mentions a few "revolutionary" technologies (the iPod and Facebook) as having been initially met with a degree of confusion, and that the technologies didn't initially catch on until users had a clear understanding of their potential and the technology, itself, evolved to better suit the needs of the user.
BI Search is an application with promising benefits: it enables users to navigate information intuitively, by "searching" rather than navigating through lists of reports, which enables them to discover meaningful data or relationships among data-sets, that may not have been made available to them.
Text analytics is closely related to search, though it pertains more to deriving information from "free text" that can be subjected to numerical analysis. Presently, it is believed that a significant amount of useful information is buried within text, and that it is not feasible for users to derive meaningful information (there's simply too much for a person to read and understand).
There is also a recognized need for information gathering from external sources: the Internet is a large storehouse of information that may relate to a company, its operations, and its industry, and the combination of text analysis and BI search can bring to light information that is currently buried among billions of Web pages.
"Advanced Visualization" pertains to innovative ways of displaying data: spark lines, billet graphs, heat maps, decomposition trees, etc. Each of these approaches provides a visual representation of data that goes beyond what traditional information graphics (bar charts, line graphs, and the like) were capable of communicating.
"Rich" reports (which are called by multiple names) are another recent development that is expected to play a part in the future application of BI. Fundamentally, these are Web-based reports that have a high degree of interactivity, enabling the user to scan data and drill down to get details by means of a Web-based interface called a "mash-up", to see relationships among data that are not possible to depict with traditional report formats. Not only can the user access and interact with reports created by others, but they can interact with the data to conduct further analysis and comparison.
Beyond Technology
While predictions of the future tend to focus on technical innovation, technology has no power to effect change unless it is adopted and utilized. The driving force behind evolution is not the method by which needs are filled, but the evolution of those needs: the recognition that BI can satisfy a need that previously could not be addressed, and the discovery of new needs as capabilities increase.
There is also the matter of politics and culture: technology is often "the easy part" in comparison with the evolution of organizations to accept the technology, adapt to new ways of thinking and working. For companies that have begun to implement BI solutions, this has been a far greater challenge, and it will continue to be so.