Enterprise Intelligence Everywhere

BI Review Online, June 12, 2008

Shailesh Kosambia, Shrinivas Mandhana

Worldwide business intelligence (BI) platform revenue is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1 percent through 2012, to reach $7.7 billion in 2012. Gartner analysts expect BI platform revenue to be less affected by an economic downturn than some other technologies because of the high priority that BI platforms hold with CIOs. BI was the number one technology priority in 2008 in a worldwide survey of 1,500 CIOs by Gartner Executive Programs.¹ The BI market has grown, evolved, matured and has become a necessity for most organizations over a period of time. Organizations today rely on BI to make informed decisions to remain agile and adaptive in the vibrant and dynamic business environment as well as to attain and maintain leadership positions.

Over the years, the way in which organizations have accessed the enterprise information for analysis has undergone dramatic change. The pervasiveness of BI tools has been increasing as these tools have made it possible to provide easy access to analyze enterprise data with enhanced data visualization. However, organizations that continue to adopt traditional BI approaches to access information will no longer survive in this challenging and fast-changing market. They will not be able to respond quickly to the needs of their customers and business partners. They will struggle to reduce their operational costs and increase operational efficiencies. We will show in this article how the next generation of BI reporting tools needs to take a radical approach to access information within and beyond the boundaries of enterprise.

Evolution of BI Reporting Tools

In the early half of the 20^th century, businesses lacked the computing resources and tools to properly analyze the data, and as a result, companies often made business decisions primarily on the basis of intuition. As businesses started automating their business processes, more and more data became available. Soon, organizations realized the importance of the systematic approach for analysis of the data that was gathered. The term “business intelligence” was first defined in an October 1958 IBM Journal article by Hans Peter Luhn titled “A Business Intelligence System.”²

In the early 1960s, reports for analyzing business within the organization were created using traditional languages such as COBOL. Queries and reporting were handled manually, and the IT department had to create each and every report for the business users. In the 1970s, several reporting tools that allowed nonprogrammers to access and analyze data were introduced. However, most products were developed on proprietary data formats. The 1980s was an era of relational databases and client/server reporting tools. Nevertheless, many organizations had a mixture of mainframes, distributed systems and databases with personal computers. Most client/server tools used structured query language (SQL) to access data. In 1989, Howard Dresner, later a Gartner analyst, popularized BI as an umbrella term to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based decision support systems.³ In the 1990s, metadata-driven reporting tools with easy-to-use interfaces were introduced for the first time in the market. BI reporting tools matured with rich features and moved to more Web-based access for wider adoption across the organization. In the early 21^st century, BI extended into process-centric, operational and more real-time reporting, which became popularly known as operational BI. At the same time, business performance management became a critical function in the era of globalization. BI tools thus became a crucial element in managing the performance needs of organizations, including the areas of planning, budgeting and financial performance management. Thus the BI usage no longer remained restricted to senior management. It has now stretched down to operational staff in organizations for managing day-to–day activities.

More Maturity Brought More Complexity

With increasing maturity, BI reporting tools have become richer in features along with the addition of new functionality. This provides an intuitive interface to the users and also helps reduce the turnaround time for IT. The flip side of this is that the reporting tools have become more complex. Today, many business users in organizations find it difficult to navigate and understand the user interface. Due to this, the goal of reducing the need for IT staff to create reports has not been achieved. In many organizations, there is an army of associates to create a set of reports.

These problems get worse when BI reporting product vendors upgrade their products with some significant changes in their user interface. Acquisitions of smaller BI vendors by larger ones and then the consolidation of these larger players have altered the product roadmaps, which has created additional disturbance and added more complexity.

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