Whereas the technology for business intelligence (BI) has developed in a way that almost no one foresaw a decade ago, the business users' needs have not evolved with the same rapidity. Ten years ago, data warehousing was hotter than ever, together with end-user tools such as ad hoc querying and emerging OLAP techniques. Five years ago, BI started to move toward a Web-based platform where ad hoc querying and OLAP analyses could be done via the Internet. BI may even be going out of fashion replaced by corporate performance management (CPM) - of which BI is a necessary component but no longer something that stands on its own to give answers to the organization.
On the other hand, the business users' needs have not changed much in 10 years, and they want the same output from BI today that they wanted 10 or even 20 years ago when BI was still called decision support.
Look again at some of the latest developments of BI: report engines that deliver standardized preformatted reports have become standard features in addition to CPM offerings. However, report engines are nothing new. On the contrary, they have been around since the 1960s. Report engines are still viable because few users want or are capable of doing their own reports in an ad hoc manner, even when there is a nice clean data warehouse to query (which is not always the case). Very few business users do OLAP analyses. Even fewer do data mining, a technique that many - including BI vendors in the reporting and OLAP market - thought would catch on in the mid-1990s. Most business users want standardized reports and, in some cases, analyses on their desk on a regular basis and according to their specific needs. Some business users analyze and query the underlying database, but they are relatively few. According to a Forrester research analyst, in some corporations as many as 90 percent of business intelligence (BI) software users need static or parameterized reports, not analytics.1
Nothing is done in an organization without reports, whether it is the presentation of analysis, balanced scorecard or corporate performance management. The underlying technology that produces these reports may certainly have changed in the last 10 years, but the outcome looks very much the same today as it did then.
What Do Most BI Users Want?
People are rather easy to understand in the sense that most want an easy life, i.e., "more for less" or "more with less." Had we not been like that, we would not have evolved from the hardship of living in caves and hunting wild and dangerous animals with wooden spears. When it comes to BI, it seems that business users still want life as simple as it can be. Some of the following requirements bear this out.
Standardized reports and analytics created automatically. Most BI users try to standardize their reports. Once defined, the report can be automatically reproduced at regular intervals, with little or no effort by the business user. If there is no standard, comparisons between information in older and newer reports is nearly impossible. Without standardization, each time a comparison is needed, a completely new report is created instead of simply comparing the figures of an older report with the latest one.
Spreadsheets. Almost everyone likes to work with what is known, and what is known to BI users today is spreadsheets. Microsoft claims to have 150,000,000 Excel business users, making Excel the most widespread report and analysis tool in the world. No matter what one may think about all the spreadsheets in an organization and the impossible task of coordinating all the information, Excel is a reality. In practice, it is difficult to replace the spreadsheets with another tool. The good thing about the spreadsheet format is that it has actually set a standard that most business users use, no matter what other BI tools they may have as well. When implementing new BI solutions, Excel is very often a reference for the concerned business users.
Paper. Another thing that the business users seems to want is paper, i.e., the possibility to print their reports and analyses. They may be selective on what they print, only choosing their specific concerns, but they will print reports. A report tool that has poor printing capabilities will be disliked from the beginning. The idea of the paperless office has not materialized as forecasted years ago. On the contrary, we produce more paper than ever, and we continue to do so because it is easier to study and discuss paper reports during meetings than reports in electronic format.
Color and charts.What has become popular again lately is a focus on getting an overview through color indicators and charts. This was popular in the 1980s with the executive information system (EIS) solutions. These solutions used vivid colors and charts, but the underlying architecture feeding the system with data was in most cases difficult to maintain and they weren't widely accepted. Modifications in the EIS system to adapt to changing business needs became too time-consuming and resource-intensive. Furthermore, it was difficult to change the presentation without involving IT personnel. In any case, color-based indicators and charts have once again found their place because today's tools and underlying architectures are much more flexible than 15 years ago. Solutions and methods such as CPM and balanced scorecard are certainly capitalizing on visualization when communicating their results to the business community.
