Intelligent Enterprise

Who Needs BI?

Organizations overwhelmingly see the value of making information accessible to all relevant functions in operations, according to a recently completed operational BI benchmark study by Ventana Research (Intelligent Enterprise served as a media sponsor, so we thank members of the IE community for sharing their insights). The problem is making it happen. The research found that the majority of operational BI deployments currently serve 100 or fewer users, not thousands. Dashboards have been a huge boon, but many operational workers still collaborate by emailing or sharing printouts of spreadsheets and reports.

Before settling on what technology will be cost effective for expanding the reach of BI, organizations must determine who needs what sort of data access, reporting and analysis capabilities. Unsatisfactory attention to user requirements, particularly regarding reporting, is a major factor slowing down BI's growth and a frequent reason why deployments have to be done over. The "build it, and they will come" era in BI and data warehousing is over. The megatrend here is about people: We will see a rise in the establishment and influence of BI competency centers and advisory councils, involving business and IT executive sponsors, to hammer out the mission and user requirements of large BI implementations.

What Information Do Users Need?

To improve customer service, many organizations are pursuing the elusive single view of the customer. Access to multiple data sources is generally necessary for this and similar efforts focused on products, suppliers, prices, performance metrics and more. Information integration, involving both structured data and unstructured content sources, is increasingly seen as a business imperative. With the volume of data growing and new forms, including sensor data and multimedia coming online, information architects have to know more about the information itself; otherwise, routine tasks of moving, loading and providing access to the data will become overwhelmingly difficult and error prone.

Master data management (MDM) was a hot topic in 2007 and will continue to be in 2008. From Microsoft to Teradata, BI and data warehousing vendors are finding that they have to have MDM in their portfolios. MDM is the process of defining and managing master data, often to establish a reference source about customers or other objects of interest across the organization. Some of the most interesting smaller vendors, including Exeros, Initiate Systems, Siperian and Trillium, are focused on MDM activities such as data relationship discovery, profiling, data quality and customer data integration. Along with data governance, MDM will be a megatrend as organizations seek to know more about their information, the quality of sources and the relationships between pieces of information. MDM will be important to how organizations speed access to the right information and present it in the right context.

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