July 30, 2009 – A new Forrester Research report emphasizes a trend toward adopting self-service, mashup business intelligence on a tight budget.
Forrester sees the BI mashups as new paradigm for pervasive decision-support systems, wrote James Kobeilus, senior analyst for data warehousing at Forrester and Information Management blogger, last month. The results were affirmed in the new report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”
Kobielus described the report’s results in his executive summary saying that, as enterprise BI professionals face severe resource constraints in the soft economy, information and knowledge management professionals provide users with self-service mashup capabilities to reduce the pressure on IT and satisfy user requests. BI mashups are able to leverage organizations' investments in both BI tools and interactive Web 2.0 technologies.
Separately, Don Campbell, IBM distinguished engineer and CTO of BI and performance management at IBM, sees composite applications as one of “10 Red Hot BI Trends” this year.
“Mashups are a particular variety of composite applications that seamlessly but loosely combine content from disparate (often third-party) applications,” Campbell wrote. “The combination of the core architecture, flexibility and Web focus of BI platforms allows for an impressive range of composite application possibilities, including embedding RSS feeds and other unstructured Web content, into BI reports and portlets.”
While Kobielus contends that no one vendor or user has constructed an end-to-end BI environment entirely focused on a mashup-style self-service development, the features available in current vendors' BI environments let nontechnical users build personalized, context-rich, role-tailored, ad hoc views of disparate data and explore information in greater depth.
To hear more about mashups download this episode of DM Radio: “Mash It Up, The Enterprise Will Take It,” featuring Kevin Quinn of InformationBuilders, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Peter Aiken of DataBlueprint and Ashok Rout of OneEApp.
Adrienne Baker is associate editor at Information Management. She can be reached at adrienne.baker@sourcemedia.com.
Be the first to comment on this post using the section below.