Intelligent Enterprise

Facebook is good for something (beyond wasting time)! It brought me to a BI 3.0 discussion thread started by Darren Cunningham, prompted by his LucidEra colleague Ken Rudin's blog entry, What's in Store for Business Intelligence in 2008.

Ken is perceptive. His five predictions are:

1. SaaS BI will continue to gain market traction.
2. BI innovation will be led by newer vendors.
3. There will be a shift away from tools towards prebuilt analytic applications.
4. Applications that integrate data and improve processes across transactional systems will drive the next wave of SaaS.
5. A new breed of BI channel partners will emerge.

Do follow the link and read the full blog article, and then consider my BI 3.0 comment addressed to Darren, that LucidEra does interesting enough work, but Ken Rudin's hot-in-2008 list is mighty solipsistic. Is there really nothing (significant) in store for BI in 2008 that isn't touched on by LucidEra offerings?

LucidEra offers hosted business analytics for sales, marketing, and finance via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. There is and will be more to BI, however, than is dreamt of in their philosophy.

My own BI 3.0 hot/heating-up list additionally includes, in rough order of 2008 significance:

6. Ever increasing attention to data quality.
7. BI integration of streaming and text-extracted data.
8. Location intelligence.
9. Collaborative analytics.
10. Advances in natural-language query and question-answering capabilities, which will all the same remain far from mature.
11. The start of attention to data provenance, reliability, and uncertainty; for instance, see Jennifer Widom's Trio work.

This is a supplemental list, not an exhaustive one. My items figuratively stand on the shoulders of the bread-and-butter BI we've been doing for years. I've touched on most of them before (examples: 7, 8, 9, 10).

They'll all be grist to the mill, that is, worth covering and considering, in 2008.

Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He consults on data management and analysis systems.

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