Thoughts on 'BI 2.0'

Came across an interesting post Tom Hudock's Business Intelligence for Business People blog.  The post is called 'Explain Why BI 2.0,' and as the title suggests, prods at the idea to tease out the real meaning.

Not being satisfied with the definition in IDC's report, which states "BI 2.0 is for customers interested in providing their employees with advanced decision support that solves specific business problems," Tom goes on:

That's not really descriptive enough,  so my BI 2.0 would:

• track business events
• make decisions in close to real-time
• use SOA and Web 2.0 technologies

I agree with Tom that IDC's definition is way too high level.  And I generally agree with his additions to the definition.  But in my opinion, something crucial is missing.

Whether you like the "2.0" christening trend or not, one thing that is common to all is an increase in user-created content and relationships.  I would say whether your 2.0 app is built using XML or JSON, AJAX or Ruby, HTTP or RPC, what matters is that users are more empowered to create.

So I don't know exactly what BI 2.0 is, but seems to me that more power needs to be put in the hands of the users.  When it comes to data, that means more power to get data, slice and dice it as needed, then publish and share the analysis.

This is not simple matter, and I can sense the raised hackles of data architects already, but the reality is that unless we can simplify the gathering of relevant data and put it into the hands of the users, we will never have BI 2.0.  IMO, we need an Integration 2.0 before we can have a BI 2.0.

Stay tuned for thoughts on that.

Comments

[DKidd]

To me, I would hope that BI 2 would put less power in the users hands. By this, I mean that business users shouldn't have unlimited access to query tools, as such, as this is where mistakes and misinterpretations are made, as business users can use the data in different ways to answer their own questions, which might be incorrect if they don't understand what the data means, where the data comes from, or what has been done to it to get to that point.

Ultimately, I would like to see less of this "power" in their hands, and rather to just deliver the information that the business user requires, through a simple "business assistant" type tool that they can ask proper business questions, without them having to know the intricate details of how the application works, or what data definitions apply to each field etc. As an example, I would like to see BI tools start to answer direct questions e.g. business user types in to a BI Assistant Interface: "How much revenue have we made this year, compared with the last 5 years, and if we continue at the current rate, what revenue are we likely to achieve at the end of the year". The BI tool should then go away and do this, and present the figures and graphical displays to the manager.
In this way, the business user doesn't need to know which fields or reports they need to run, as they are really not that interested, they just want an answer to their business question.

Perhaps this is too far an advance in technology as we stand, so perhaps this will be the idea of BI 3, but I would like to see the industry consider providing information to business users that direct real business questions at the program (i.e. literally), without them having to use a report/query interface to get the information, as they do now, where they need to know how to use the tool.

Hopefully, we can introduce some core AI into BI, as this is where I see massive business benefits coming from.

[Tim Matthews]

Darryn,

I agree that unfettered access to powerful query tools could be dangerous. Assuming the business users even wanted to use these, the danger of working off of "seemingly" valid data could lead to some very bad decisions.

The approach you advocate is a good one. I'm not sure AI will finally come to the rescue, but a friendly "Ask Jeeves" style interface as you suggest would certainly be more Web-like.

Ultimately, I think BI products will need to look like Web 2.0 products and services. If behind the scenes queries and data cleansing can be made to work well, then users would love it. I think it's also worth noting that an interesting feedback loop could be created from users back to admins about the correctness and quality of data - sometimes the users just know better.

Tim