What Is the Future of Business Intelligence? 123
Roland Piquepaille writes "Mitch Betts asked this question to many technology leaders in the field of business intelligence. Here is one selected prediction. 'In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year,' says Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Check this column for more forecasts and an update on the adoption of so-called 'executive dashboards.' You also can read the original Computerworld article for even more information."
Nothing but marketing/business buzzwords (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people use graphs, pie charts, etc. daily? Look at the newspaper and see how many are in the financial section. How many people have the default stock ticker in their AIM window?
Yeah, I thought so......these aren't the droids you are looking for, move along...
Re:Business Intelligence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Military intelligence has everything to with gatherering information and passing it on to those who are supposed to figure out how to use it. After all, we can't be stuck with that sort of intelligence the civilians use, can we =) ?
Oxymoron. (Score:5, Insightful)
What they really need in business is to find that all-elusive step, y'know they one right before "4) Profit!"
Anyway, regarding visualization software (let's not get into the buzzword aspects of this concept), do you really think CEOs will use it? Half of them don't even use email yet (I hear one or two are known for having their secretaries print out their emails for them). They're notoriously technologically illiterate. I assume they'll remain that way until the next generation or two succeed them (ie. people that have grown up being computer literate).
Nonsense unbound (Score:3, Insightful)
Reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
I take university courses in management, and am repeatedly awestruck by the sheer stupidity of some of my peers. Many of them graduate and go on to become rather useless business people.
Always remember, Incompetent People Rarely Know They Are [fuse.net]
Wow, how insightful! (Score:5, Insightful)
My my, we would be utter fools not to invest all our spare money in his dot-bomb, wouldn't we?
Sheesh.
PR != news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow, how insightful! (Score:3, Insightful)
I like this part of his quote: "And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year." Does that mean if I add a graphing feature to some application, call it "data visualization" and bill it as one of its top three features, I'll get my cut of that $1B? What a lame-ass generalized forecast; looks to me like he just submitted some gibberish in hopes he'd get his company's name mentioned somewhere.
I still haven't been able to figure out what a "CEU" is, though. Chief Executive Unicorn? Cheesy Estimates r-Us?Lessons of "Push," dangers of micomanagement (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing I love quite so much as business analysts telling us "for sure" what's going to be hot in three to five years. Either it's something so obvious no one can miss it (like "the Internet will be big!"), or else they're horribly wrong.
Anyone remember how "push" technology was going to be the Next Big Thing? How the real money on the Internet was pushing sports scores and stock tickers out to people so they could avaoid all that tiresome clicking? Remember the Wired cover story on Push? Well, I get the same feeling about "executive dashboards." Show me a man who has graph on his desktop showing up to the minute price trends on hog belly futures, and I'll show you a man ready to replicate the same mistakes that a million or so day traders made during the Internet bubble: having access to instant information doesn't mean you understand the information you're seeing.
The businesses which can benefit the most from real-time information have already implamented it, and not as "executive dashboards." Think of WallMart. Or the U.S. Army. But they're designed to flow the information as hard data to people who actually use the information, rather than as pretty graphs to executives. You want to empower people at all levels of your organization, not micromanage them.
Is visualization useful? Sure, that's why we have things like Visio, PowerPoint, and Keynote. But never mistake up-to-the-minute readouts of information for a true understanding of that underlying data.
Predictions -- consider the source.. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hot new technology 'A' will be widely adopted and a multi-billion dollar industry in the next 3-5 years." -- Bob Anonomous, CEO vaporwhere corp, a hot new technology 'A' startup.
-- Greg
Re:Won't Work. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you have a point, although some of the small number of geniuses available can probably design some visualization methods/tools/whatever that will allow the rest of us to make a little more sense of vast amounts of data without having to understand it in depth. After all, many business managers seem to get along just fine today without having the faintest clue about what's really going on in their business. Maybe the future of business technology is designing tools that will let managers think they have a big-picture dashboard system so they will leave the lower level folks alone to do things "the way they should be done." ;)
I wonder when (if?) we will get to the point where no human, no matter how talented or experienced, will be able to figure these things out? <insert sci-fi AI doom-and-gloom end - of - the - human - race - because - we - start - letting - machines - think - for - us speculation here>
Re:Business Intelligence? (Score:1, Insightful)
What happens next is that they realize you know the material better than they, so they get rid of you.
This leaves them free to mis-manage without looking over their shoulders.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reality check (Score:3, Insightful)
The real trick is to get someone who really knows what's important to figure out what to show, and not let the users pick random charts (which will tend to look interesting, but not promote the right decisions).
The Problem with Executive Dashboards (Score:3, Insightful)
First, you have to make sure that your core data is good. The most useful way to organize it on the front end might not instantly show the best way for the CEO to see it on the back end. That means you have to translate that data (lists of order numbers, ordered products, persons ordering) into what the executive cares about (number of orders, products sold, money collected).
Whoops -- you have to find out what the executive cares about, don't you? And it might not be as simple as what he says he cares about. Are there any orders he doesn't want included -- samples, say? If some products are bundled, do we include the combined products as units, or unbundled? Is "money collected" just the cash we now have in the bank, or is it money we have been promised, or the expected revenue from what has been sold? Hopefully, the executive will find time to define his requirements this precisely.
Then you have to set up the system that can get your data from Point A to Point B. Easy if you are really certain what you are trying to answer. Not, if not.
Once that's done, then you can consider setting up a "dashboard" -- assuming you're sure that you can define the business precisely enough, and won't miss an important metric along the way, and the business won't change -- hasn't changed -- in the meantime.
I'm sure there are products that will make this process easier, but it's significant work for everyone involved. Although some of it could be automated, it will still require that the people setting it up actually THINK about what they are doing.
TSG
Review of the Projections (Score:2, Insightful)
The terminology and concepts referred to in these articles are mostly old hat, and anyone who's good and has experience with:
- decision support systems (DSS)
- business intelligence (BI - similar to DSS)
- data warehousing
- ods
- data marts
- reporting
- balanced score-cards
- data mining
- personalization
- SPC
- management science
should be familiar with all of them. Even some folks who've implemented BI components within large ERP & CRM applications should be familiar with them.
None of the projections are revolutionary - and none appear terribly insightful. Let's walk thru them one at a time:
1. In five years 100m people will use visualization tools almost daily: can't speak to the numbers, but I would be surprised if a majority of computer-users aren't using analytic technology daily - without even realizing it. As far as visualization goes, we're starting to enter the 'dancing-dog' phase of visualization - when the technology is over-applied without any thought of the usability or business impacts. So, yeah - we might see quite a lot of use, but I don't think we'll see nearly so much successful use of it.
2. BI will save $200 billion a year: perhaps, but I doubt that enough users are sufficiently info-literate (not computer-literate!) to pull this one off. Still, even with the primitive skills that people have in this area, BI can make efficiency improvements.
3. In 2-3 years quarterly-adjustments will be ditched in favor of real-time ones. The use of real-time analytics is increasing, though slowly. Micro-adjustments in pricing is only slowly be introduced, anything larger will continue to be adjusted on a quarterly basis - since it involves organizational changes - and people can't sustain real-time changes.
4. In 5 years BI & data mining terms will disappear: this is the one projection that I haven't heard before, and it seems the least likely. Both are essential prerequisites to embedding analytics in applications - since they help identify the rules, algorithms, etc to be used real-time. BI is also useful along-side analytical applications - since it allows you to measure what the real-time app is up to.
My own predictions? Analytics are definitely going to become more embedded into applications. More importantly however - people will become more accustomed to, and more comfortable with the basic concepts. And that's the real pre-requisite to making progress here. After all, the challenges to making better decisions based upon quantitive methods aren't technological - they're social. You need people who are info-literate, people who care, and organizations willing to question themselves. *That's* the real challenge!
To what degree is intelligence visual? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps visual and linguistic intelligence both exist in their own right, but some cultures do better at one or the other? If so, we're still a culture built on "In the beginning was the Word." We think we're so visual because of movies and whatever, but compared to the visual immersion of a traditional tribal, forest culture in its heyday we're nowhere with vision. So what does it do if we get a bunch of executives "visualizing"? Does it really make them smarter than if they work out their decisions logically, in language, in the traditional way of our culture? Or is it just a new way of dressing up the yes-men?
Even to the extent that we can importantly visualize, what gives you the clearer, more vital vision, a well crafted book - just words - or a comic? Because, let's face it, what software provides is at best like a cheap comic. And if financial markets are the measure of how bright visualization tools make us
My experience... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actual data marts or (god forbid) data warehouses which span information from disparate sources require expert project management and control, not to mention buy-in from all departments. Let's not gloss over the security issues, data retention, extraction, and a cornicopia of problems along with it.
Most of these companies get in the door through the following ways:
1. Slick sales
2. The loathed "proof of concept" in which they take some snippet of your data and create a cube which is just good enough to sell the rest of the product.
3. Exaggerated promises
Let's face it - very few companies have 'clean' data out there, and the required work to make dimensions stretch across the enterprise is mind-numbing. Then, just as you have it down and finished, some department installs an upgrade, or switches a product, and you have to redesign your dimensions and ETL all over again. Woohhoooo!
**sigh** I love BI, but companies typically just don't get the actual investment you have to make in order to get those great graphs and drill-downs.
&J