But while BI maturity in enterprises continues to grow, and BI tools become more function rich and robust, the promise of efficient and effective BI solutions remains quite challenging at best, and elusive at worst.
Why? Two main reasons. BI is all about best practices and lessons learned, which only come with years of experience. Additionally, traditional BI technologies (ETL, data warehousing, reporting, OLAP) have not kept pace with the ever changing business and regulatory requirements.
In a work-in-progress research document, building on a last year's relevant blog post on next gen BI, we plan to review top best practices and next generation BI technologies for our clients to watch and adopt in 2011 in order to improve their chances to deliver successful BI initiatives. Here's the proposed document outline and major themes:
Best Practices to Adopt in 2011
- Emphasis on business ownership and Data Governance
- Combining top down Performance Management, with bottom up approaches
- Emphasis on Change Management
- Loosly coupling Data Preparation vs. Data Usage
- Different treatments for Front vs. Back Office users and applications
- Using Hub and Spoke Model for data architecture and organizational structures
- Using Agile Development methodology
- Working with SMEs
- Using BI on BI and aligning BI with Incentive Comp
- Achieving Tangible BI ROI
- Providing Self Service capabilities to end users
Next Generation BI Technologies to Implement in 2011
Technologies to make BI more automated
- Automated information discovery
- Making BI contextual
- Full BI lifecycle automation
- Automating decision management
Technologies to make BI more unified
- Logically unifying data sources
- Unifying structured data and unstructured content
- Unifying disk and streaming data
- Unifying historical, current and predictive analysis
- Unifying complex data structures
- Unifying BI, DW, ETL and ERP metadata
Technologies to make BI more pervasive
- BI within processes
- BI within Information Workplace
- Self service which includes BI SaaS
- Offline/disconnected
- Mobile
Technologies to reduce BI limitations
- Adaptive data models
- Unlimited dimensionality
- Exploration + analysis
- Elasticity via cloud
And last, but not least
- Technologies to enable BI self service
- Technologies to make BI more agile
What did Forrester miss? Would love to hear from you.
