Panorama Business Intelligence

We all keep reading about how BI vendors  have ‘cracked to code’ of making  BI really pervasive – “BI for the masses”. I just read this post from Shawn Rogers that talks about that.

When I look at the last 30 years of BI, what I see is mostly evolution on the back end. Most of what changed in the last 30 years from a BI perspective is just better, simpler, cheaper ways of building reports out of operational data. Data today is much cleaner and much (MUCH) more available for report / analytical view creation.

But did that really make an impact on usage of BI by the masses or did it simplify the work of those that used analytics and reports anyhow? Is BI pervasive just because it is so easy for IT and analysts to build reports? Has the fact that Excel is 50% cheaper than a pure play BI solution made a real BI adoption difference? Is BI, from an end user perspective, all that difference?

The way I see this, BI has gone a long way for the IT side of the house  but at the same time has made a relatively minor difference from an end user perspective. Users still get reports that they have to navigate using specialized tools and figure out what is the most interesting / exceptional data that requires their attention. 30 years ago this was on paper and now it is in a browser but that is the difference. Compare this to web navigation…. What if search engines did not exist and revolutionize the usage of the web, what if the only improvements would be the way people store and retrieve their favorites / bookmarks in the browser, would that have made the same impact?    

So I would argue that neither price, nor additional simplification of data collection is what will make BI pervasive. For that to happen, a true quantum leap is required. Insights in non BI tools, business rule engines, instant actions, automation…. Sounds like buzz words but as we are working out the new products around our Proactive BI products I think you will see some of how we believe BI should be delivered to become pervasive.

You can read more about this here:

Next generation BI from Panorama – Proactive Business Intelligence Overview (download)