TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Five Trends Changing the Face of BI

Ericka Chickowski | Date: 08-20-09 | Comments

Predictive analytics, agile development, user-centric business intelligence and improvements in visualization are giving new life to this mature technology.

Table of Contents:

Five Trends Changing the Face of BI - Trend 5: Operationalization of IT

Trend 5: Operationalization of IT

At the advent of BI, the idea was to put the right data and analytics in the hands of people who could make actionable changes that would improve the way business is done. Somewhere along the line, that simple idea grew muddled.

BI systems grew up to be scattered across enterprises, complicated and difficult to use�even by business analysts.

As enterprises assess how to move forward with their BI efforts, one of the driving forces of these initiatives should be to make BI simpler and easier to access by a wide range of workers. In short, organizations want to bring BI back to its philosophical roots.

�When I started, one of the promises of BI was empowering decision-makers and knowledge workers,� says PivotLink�s chief marketing officer, Dyke Hensen, who calls himself an old BI �oak tree� after 20 years in the space. �It was to create pervasive BI and leverage BI for everyone. The problem is that over the years, a lot of these offerings became very complex, very bloated and expensive.�

Eckerson of TDWI agrees, saying that it is odd that so many enterprises� operational workers have to switch gears between a business intelligence application and an operational application in order to open a dashboard or a report to see the impact of an action taken based on business intelligence.

Over the last two years, the market has seen a drive to consolidate these tasks with a push by major ERP vendors to help bring BI under a larger operational umbrella. Acquisitions such as the SAP pickup of Business Objects last year are a sign of where the BI space is headed.

Eckerson believes the recent shift to bring together business intelligence systems and operational systems such as ERP makes sense. �There is definitely an opportunity for vendors to embed BI right into operational applications,� he says.

Pershing�s Nagappan also thinks that operationalizing BI is a no-brainer. He says his organization worked to do so years ago, leveraging tool sets from Information Builders and in-house work.

�It�s a very key area for us, and we have done this for many years,� he says. �I know many other people in business intelligence who focus on finance [intelligence] and a few other [intelligence areas], but at Pershing, we focused on operational and compliance [intelligence] so many years ago because compliance is a key aspect of our business.�

Brian Kilcourse, managing partner for Retail Systems Research, a Miami-based retail IT analyst firm, agrees that this �operationalization� of BI is currently one of the most significant intelligence trends sweeping through enterprises. He�s seen a lot of anecdotal evidence illustrating how a shift to embedding BI within operations gives workers out in the field better tools to drive day-to-day operations and gives customers better ways to make informed purchase decisions.

�We�re seeing a lot of companies injecting actionable information into operational processes in just-in-time fashion,� Kilcourse says. For example, in one case study he analyzed, Kilcourse witnessed Virgin Megastores offer its store managers an effective way to improve sales. BI systems were integrated with up-to-the-minute in-store sales so that managers could see how hit titles were selling in comparison to other hits with similar sales.

The intelligence match-up compared the first few days of release of one title with other releases that had similar sales starts, giving managers the ability to project sales going forward. It also offered actionable analysis that enabled workers to pair up overstocked albums with hot sellers in endcaps to move otherwise stationary products.

Even though Virgin closed its retail stores for other reasons, Kilcourse says this application of operational BI is too good to be ignored. �They were basically doing a kind of a product mashup on the sales floor, in more or less real time, based on the signals they were getting from sales as they were occurring,� he says. �They were basically doing shelf resets based on the fact that one title was flying off the shelves, and they wanted the other one to fly with it.�

Kilcourse says these kinds of initiatives help organizations better adopt a sense-and-respond mentality. He also believes that embedding BI into operations provides very good back-end benefits.

�One of the big values is that the operational systems or processes can deliver to the business intelligence system some information that says, �This is what happened after you responded.��