With the ability to customize products and orders, conduct research about products and even read pages of books before buying them, consumers have a lot of control when making purchasing decisions. If they are not satisfied, they can move from one business to another with the click of a mouse.
This amazing consumer power mandates that applications on the Web have dynamic contents, with rich visualization and extreme interactivity. These key capabilities can appropriately be referred to as rich Internet applications.
Once people become accustomed to consumer-facing RIAs in business-to-consumer interactions (B2C) , they expect the same everywhere. These expectations for RIAs apply to interactions between businesses (B2B) and between employers and employees (B2E).
Human resources are one of the biggest capital expenditures within an organization, and keeping employees content with their work experience is one of the biggest challenges there is. Providing them with a Web environment according to their expectations is one aspect of contentment. Retaining qualified employees translates into saving a substantial amount of money. Providing RIAs in the workplace is a crucial aspect of running a successful business. That is business intelligence.
In order to provide dynamic, interactive access with rich visualization and RIAs, B2C, B2B and B2E applications will require a robust back-end server. Initially, few users may access these applications, but that number will increase once people find out that the applications help them make better decisions faster. Success usually breeds success.
As a result, the server architecture has to be able to scale, in a matter of seconds, to support comprehensive data access, securely and reliably, potentially for thousands of users at the same time. Scalability is increasingly an important feature for the architecture of BI products, because when BI applications really take off, you don’t want success to make you fail.
Consumers Drive BI Trends
While a high percentage of consumers today are using the Internet to buy goods, it is company developers who create the consumer-facing applications and the back-office applications. According to Forrester Research (see references), "To get the most from their workforces, firms should design employee-facing tools and look for opportunities to leverage RIA's specific capabilities to improve usability."
The most successful consumer-facing interfaces are now appearing behind company firewalls, in the form of employee-facing interfaces. And employees have the ability to make the capabilities of these user interfaces even richer and more sophisticated for BI systems. This trend of sophisticated, attractive interfaces will, in turn, result in even richer interfaces for suppliers, partners and everyone else communicating via the Internet with the organization.
Another set of applications that are positively affected by this trend are back-office applications, such as those that track product/service delivery, revenue generation, revenue collection, etc. Today, with organizations increasingly geographically dispersed, employees must be able to communicate effectively. The intranet development environment is becoming just as important as the extranet self-service applications that serve consumers.
The collaborative workforce is made up of consumers and employees who have joined virtual communities. In the near future, the majority of work performed by employees will be collaborative rather than independent. BI needs an architecture that enables these employees/developers and consumers to work together to rapidly develop relevant, usable data views.
In order to accomplish this, BI will have to support “open” technology architectures for collaborative approaches to software development. The software developers need robust information access, integration and delivery capabilities. And consumer technologies have to be integrated into the enterprise computing environments. As explained before, it is consumers who are driving BI trends.
Intranet-based BI and performance management applications help enterprises run more effectively and efficiently. Extranet-based self-service applications improve customer loyalty. In order to achieve both of these benefits, most of the applications have to be developed using extranet/intranet/Web as the main platform. Consumer-oriented software is already mostly Web-based. Now, enterprise software and the majority of BI applications must also be Web-based. That means most applications have to be running effectively inside and outside the firewall.
RIAs typically transfer the processing required for the user interface to the Web client, keeping the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the “state of the program,” etc.) back on the application server. According to Forrester Research, RIAs are well-suited for financial services interactions that are complex, rely on graphics and models, and require data from multiple sources. Patterns that already exist in the data have to be presented visually by the Web-based extranet/intranet applications.
Data Virtualization and Consumerization of IT
Can BI technology handle the mass quantities of disparate data stored by businesses? BI needs to recognize the data and make it easily accessible to consumers, who have, in turn, become office workers. Virtualization refers to accessing disparate data stored in different places and formats. The software should have the appropriate architecture to access disparate data without knowing the actual location or type of data. This is a feature of cloud computing. (Please see my column “Who in the World Doesn’t Want to Reach for the Clouds?”)
The "consumerization" of IT refers to the impact that technologies, products and approaches designed for consumer use have on developers, technology providers and enterprises. Supporting virtualization, commoditization and consumerization of these IT resources requires the capability of distributing these resources.
