The Evolution and Future of Business Intelligence

Discussing the evolution of business intelligence can be confusing due to terminology and ambiguous buzz words. BI Gen I is about reporting, usually long after the fact. Its power has been in a technology (online analytical processing, or OLAP) that allows for very efficient slice-and-dice querying of data.The power of BI Gen I should not be underestimated, because for the first time in the history of information management it allowed business-oriented staff to play with data themselves, rather than waiting for IT to produce a more conventional, noninteractive report. Still, it offered intelligence derived from historic data, and any insight is, therefore, not nearly as actionable as it could be. That put pressure on BI to move to the next level.

BI Gen II is pretty much the same thing, yet this time it brings a real-time capability. This is not a feature to be easily dismissed because it implies that every step within the end-to-end process – from extraction, transformation, loading to the slicing and dicing end user tooling – needed to become at least somewhat real time, too.

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2009_140/business_intelligence_bi-10016145-1.html