Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Trends: 8 for ’08

BI Briefs

Information Management Online, February 28, 2008

Rick Sherman

Let’s look into the crystal ball for 2008. What industry trends will affect our industry during the next year and beyond? These trends are not product pitches nor are they all positive.

There are two underlying themes across each trend:

1. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a significant factor in the adoption of trends. TCO is not merely license costs, but how much time, resources, skills and change is necessary to implement a trend. Budget costs are often trivial in the overall TCO calculation. Trends that lower the TCO for BI, DW and performance management will accelerate their adoption.
2. Most enterprises need an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach. Enterprises (that are a real operating business) have data and people reporting/analyzing data to make business decisions.

Trends where the underlying systems, data and people can evolve will have a greater chance for success. The big bang, i.e., replace everything approach, sounds great, but most times it is cost-prohibitive and people are not going to be able to absorb that much change.

Enterprises are ready for changes, but not wholesale replacements. It often gets lost on the technologists, but enterprises are in the business of selling product and services not building IT systems. These systems are support functions only. No matter how cool the new tool is, it is only useful if it helps the businesses sell more or make more profit.

The 8 for ’08 trends that should be making significant impact on our industry:

1. Dazed and confused - product roadmaps, upgrades and migration,
2. The song remains the same - data shadows systems continue to be the pervasive, reporting and analytic platform
3. No quarter - data integration suites enable enterprise data management,
4. Houses of the holy – extract, transform and load lite continues to build momentum,
5. Ramble on - traditional BI vendor shortlist expands,
6. Stairway to heaven - cost and resource-effective tools rule,
7. Dazed and confused (again) - emerging technologies remain emerging, and
8. Nobody's fault but mine - data governance slowly continues to emerge.

In subsequent articles, I will discuss each one of these trends.

Rick Sherman has more than 20 years of business intelligence and data warehousing experience, having worked on more than 50 implementations as a director/practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers and while managing his own firm. He is the founder of Athena IT Solutions, a Boston-based consulting firm that provides data warehouse and business intelligence consulting, training and vendor services. Sherman is a published author of over 50 articles, an industry speaker, a DM Review World Class Solution Awards judge, a data management expert at searchdatamanagement.com and has been quoted in CFO and Business Week. Sherman can be found blogging on performance management, data warehouse and business intelligence topics at The Data Doghouse.You can reach him at rsherman@athena-solutions.com or (617) 835-0546.

In addition to teaching at industry conferences, Sherman offers on-site data warehouse/business intelligence training, which can be customized and teaches public courses in the Boston area. He also teaches data warehousing at Northeastern University 's graduate school of engineering.

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