Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published yesterday a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I share our thoughts on BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012.


Thank you so much to the people of Spotfire's blog for the invitation to share my thoughts on the subject.

2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today the Part Two of the update of the post 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence, written by me 6 months ago, entitled 2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. The Part One 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update), was published last week.


Earlier this year, I also published a post on their blog with Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011.

Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation to write guest posts. I am truly grateful.

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update)

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today a guest blog post written by me, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update). This post is an update of a post written 6 months ago.

Once again, thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the opportunity.

Business Intelligence Trumps Facebook

Baseline published a post commenting on their research Top 10 Tech Trends of 2011, where they identified that the enthusiasm is for business analytics and knowledge management, where nearly two-thirds of new commitments are expected to be at a strong or very strong level. According Baseline research, while social networking may be a hot topic, finding a way to make sense of all that data with BI systems will be the 2nd biggest tech trend of 2011.

The survey showed about 9 percent more organizations expecting significant deployments of Business intelligence (BI) systems in 2011, compared with last year’s survey. And it’s high on end-users’ and finance’s wish lists. The driver of this interest seems to be the need to corral all these new, usually disorganized information sources.

According Bill Bosler, CIO at Texas Consultants: “Some social networking techniques will clearly impact all users, and deployments will continue at their own pace -- independent of corporate intent”, which recently designed an ambitious BI tool as part of a new oil refinery project in the Middle East. “There will be plenty of action on the analytics side, crunching all the new real-time data collected by both new and traditional means, and anticipating and mitigating challenges before they occur.”

Traits of Next-Generation BI

Dave Kellogg writes an excellent blog where he covers next-generation database management, search, and content management technologies along with commentary on Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the business of software. Dave's blog is worth reading. This month, he wrote a great post, entitled Traits of Next-Generation BI (Business Intelligence), where he commented on his thoughts of the future of BI. Below are the Dave's Traits of next-generation BI:

In memory, columnar, and compressed. Most solutions rely on the fact that the source data for most problems can now fit in memory, typically using a columnar and compressed format. Some solutions are even able to perform work on the data without first decompressing it.

Fast. The dream of BI — particularly for interactive analysis tools – has always been “speed of thought” analysis. Thanks to the above point and thanks to additional performance optimizations (e.g., to expoit CPU cache locality), this dream is becoming a reality.

Directly connected. Next-generation BI tools generally connect directly to the underlying source databases (and/or the Internet) to capture data. This means they must also have basic data integration capabilities both so they properly align data from different systems and dynamically refresh it.

Schema-free. In order to accomodate semi-structured information and to be able integrate information from different sytems, next-generation BI does not require the up-front definition of a schema. Instead, relationships among data (e.g., hierarchy) are discovered dynamically.

Beautiful. While this is best exemplified by Tableau (where visualization is the principal focus) next-generation BI tools generally provide beautiful visualizations that are more powerful than the basic report and bar chart. (Note that I named a name here because I consider Tableau mid-stage, not early-stage.)

Mobile. Next-generation BI tools typically assume a brower-based client and often the need to create device-specific clients (e.g., a native iPad app) to supplement it. Some companies focus exclusively on mobile BI.

Neutral. Next-generation BI tools exploit the fact that a multi-billion dollar vacuum was created in the market when the BI leaders were consolidated and became units of IBM (e.g., Cognos) or SAP (e.g., BusinessObjects).

About the future of data warehouse, he wrote: if you can fit your entire data set in memory and dynamically calculate the answer to any question at high speed, then why do you need a data warehouse full of precalculated aggregates again? I thus see a “middle squeeze” on the data warehouse market in the future.

- For most applications of normal size and analytic complexity, people will use next-generation BI on top of raw data sources, unless they have very messy data or a need for extensive history.

- For large applications (i.e., big data) and/or high analytic complexity, people will use advanced analytic platforms (e.g, Aster Data). This, of course, begs the question whether anyone is working on BI tools that exploit and optimize the new, high-end analytic engines and the answer to that question is happily “yes” as well.

Proposed Themes For BI Trends 2011

Business Intelligence remains a top priority for companies. A successful BI has a positive impact on business performance, helping companies make better decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. There are several trends in the BI area, recently I commented on this issue in a guest blog post for the TIBCO Spotfire's BI Blog. Boris Evelson also wrote a post on this issue in his Forrester's blog, where he made a list with the major themes for BI in 2011:

BEST PRACTICES TO ADOPT IN 2011

- Emphasis on business ownership and data governance
- Combining top-down performance management, with bottom-up approaches
- Emphasis on change management
- Loosely coupling data preparation vs. data usage
- Different treatments for front-office vs. back-office users and applications
- Using a hub-and-spoke model for data architecture and organizational structures
- Using Agile development methodology
- Working with SMEs
- Using BI on BI and aligning BI with incentive comp
- Achieving tangible BI ROI
- Providing self-service capabilities to end users

NEXT-GENERATION BI TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPLEMENT IN 2011

Technologies to make BI more automated:

- Automated information discovery
- Making BI contextual
- Full BI life-cycle automation
- Automating decision management

Technologies to make BI more unified:

- Logically unifying data sources
- Unifying structured data and unstructured content
- Unifying disk and streaming data
- Unifying historical, current, and predictive analysis
- Unifying complex data structures
- Unifying BI, DW, ETL, and ERP metadata

Technologies to make BI more pervasive:

- BI within processes
- BI within the Information Workplace
- Self-service, which includes BI SaaS
- Offline/disconnected
- Mobile

Technologies to reduce BI limitations:

- Adaptive data models
- Unlimited dimensionality
- Exploration + analysis
- Elasticity via cloud

And last, but not least:

- Technologies to enable BI self-service
- Technologies to make BI more agile

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

I was invited to write a guest blog post for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog. TIBCO Spotfire is a leader in the data visualization space. Today they published the post, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation.