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."
You Really Want to Know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many haven't worked with what they manage (UNIX, Windows, networking, accounting, QA, etc). Because of this they don't understand the day to day working of the people and products they manage.
They also need to be in touch. From my experience when the boss calls a meeting and asks us to tell him or her what we need to change nobody speaks up. We need management we feel we can talk to without fear of retribution. Also, they need to keep their ears open for the watercooler gossip they will never hear directly. It helps judge morale, allows them to quell or substantiate rumors and find out what the employees really think.
The last, and largest one, is gutsy. This means when the workers tell a manager something that he or she can't take care of directly they should have the guts to take it to their manager to help. I've seen too many managers who kiss ass and are afraid to put a small tarnish on their reputation to go to bat for their employees.
The problems we face now aren't with the technology, but with the people.
What Is the Future of Business Intelligence? (Score:2, Interesting)
PHB's will multiply drastically, afterall management is more motivational to employees than paying them more. Cubicles will be reduced in size by 50% so they can be more efficient and fit more people per square meter. Computers will be ridiculously faster, so ambitious deadlines will be even more ambitious, just in time to meet that ever so important tradeshow deadline. And since technology will be a lot cheaper in the future, budgets will be halved over and over again in order to make sure projects under-deliver.
Business Intelligence, 100 years from now, will drop like a rock.
The company I worked for already tried this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "dashboards" provided green/yellow/red status with click-through to actual data points.
The execs spent so much time obsessing over the quality of data in the dashboards and fixing problems when they arose that they never got any actual use out of them.
It just gives execs one more thing to complain about and blame on other people to get unreasonable performance gains (that in reality areperformance losses in the form of lowered morale and sabotage.)
IMO, The Future is Integrated (Score:5, Interesting)
Certainly data mining and "buisness intelligence" can save corporations advertising dollars, but what about the people who buck the trends? Advertisers will tap into the internet thanks to small businesses who could readily advertise for much less money to the whole world, if need be. Local mini-webs for individual cities like Yahoo sets up would be perfect places for such advertising. Sadly, I also predict that AOL and Microsoft will try to merge at some point soon to facilitate their own data mining practices and to try to control most of these local webs. Their offers of integrated services from web access to web navigation to easy-to-understand web tools are already one of their biggest selling points. I say try to merge because despite current politics and recent events there are still legal limits to corporate mergers.
Regardless, I think companies will try to start integrating more of the Internet into their business. Small businesses will start using data mining as the technologies behind it become more easily exploited. And larger computer companies will probably start trying to consolidate in order to offer their own browsers, OSes (Linux derivatives for the masses seems likely to compete with Billy), and internet connection services all in one package.
Won't Work. (Score:2, Interesting)
The vast majority of people that are managers will not have the mental capacity to process this information in the time frame with which an "executive dashboard" promises to deliver it.
And i'm not saying that in a cruel way - i'm not getting at managers or anyone, i'm saying that _we_ human beings, as a race - the vast majority of us cannot process information that quickly.
These tools are going to require the mental capacity of a "Genius" to be able to capitalise from them, and very, very few of us, particularly those in middle management positions
the future of business intelligence (Score:4, Interesting)
visualization helps to sell to C level execs (Score:5, Interesting)
Visualization can not be a goal in itself
Re:Nothing but marketing/business buzzwords (Score:5, Interesting)
I develop workflow systems with built-in dashboard display metrics so that data could be displayed in "real time" to the PHBs who make all the real decisions in the business. Yeah everything is buzzword compliant here, but the story about dashboards is real. As a developer working in both the PHB decision-making world and the low-level IT development, I can attest to it.
Why this isn't going to work (Score:3, Interesting)
That aside, the point no one has brought up yet is that having second by second analysis of your sales, et al. is completely useless UNLESS you are also able to make second by second changes to your business to compensate for them. It is sort of like having a wristwatch that displayed time in nanoseconds. Sure, nanoseconds exist, they allow very precise time measurements, and so on an so forth. But other than physics experiments, would we really use them? Not only that, but if management makes stupid decisions on a daily basis, what do you think they'll be like on a minute-to-minute one?
In my opinion, this is just more management crap that they're trying to sell to businesses. Their work has dried up from the boom years and they decided, "hey, here's a way we can do something that appears to be useful and make corporations pay a lot of money for our software and consulting!" In five years, I predict, these people will have fleeced the gullible and have moved on to the next "hot" fake trend.
Re:IMO, The Future is Integrated (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, you can't get more than a detail view on a specific thing at once because of the vast amount of data involved. A good example was the one about the airline and one view for the person responsible for in-air snacks versus the different view for the person who makes sure there is just the right amount of fuel at each airport. Imagine if you could generate a (realtime) picture of whatever interrelated information you wanted (inventory at the Delco brake factory and how it affects the production of Chevy Cavaliers in the next 48 hours, for instance) in a clean, clear format. That's what I think this is all about, and I suspect it's what the futurists had in mind all along, but it got lost in all the Brave New World hype pushed out by Wired and the other hustlers.
Data mining, as it refers to trying to predict future customer behavior based on past data, is nothing new and will always be with us, to the extent that it actually works and is cost-effective. Consumer companies have been doing market research for a long, long time and have it pretty much down to a science. Having the ability to look at more detailed information may not add enough of an effect to make it worth the effort and expense of setting up huge data centers just to get that last 2 percent.
As to your last point, about companies selling their own operating systems and web browsers, that's pretty much wishful thinking. There is no business reason I could think of to do this, and every reason not to (vast cost, consumer resistance, dubious benefits).