Businesses are facing an emerging crisis over business intelligence (BI).
On the one hand, many of the high technology costs and performance impediments are being removed, leading to greater user expectations of what BI should do for them. On the other hand, IT continues to struggle with many of the less technical BI demands, driven by these expectations and an ever increasing rate of change in modern business processes.
"This has led to significant growth in what might be called proactive BI development," says Lawrence Corr, director at DecisionOne Consulting. "The lead time between operational development - the creation of new data sources - and the traditional reactive BI development has been eroding for years."
Corr continues: "In the past, businesses built BI upon relatively stable, relatively well-understood, source systems and business processes. Now, and in the future, the implementation of disruptive business models and the increased use of agile for operational development means BI solutions must be designed with far fewer source system certainties and developed in parallel with those uncertain sources."
Corr will deliver a keynote at the upcoming ITWeb BI Summit, in March.
He discusses some of the challenges facing companies in the future: "If gathering BI requirements using established techniques was challenging when stakeholders knew their established business processes and had already touched their operational data, businesses are going to need radically new agile approaches to analysis and design, to be proactive and develop tomorrow's BI solutions on time."
His keynote at the BI Summit will focus on collaborative modelling techniques for actively engaging business model innovators in the design of future BI data stores, and gaining a head start on agile BI development. Corr says local corporates are adopting agile development principles, but many have yet to maximise the business benefits these offer.
"If agile practices are applied correctly to BI then they should, for example, make it easier to measure a return, as they focus on business value and provide for stronger feedback mechanisms. Agile is all about reducing the risk of unnecessary requirements leading to sprawling big designs upfront and project cost overruns."
Corr will be joined by other local and international BI experts at the ITWeb Business Intelligence 2014 Summit, in Johannesburg, from 25-27 March. Click here to access the programme for the event and take advantage of the early-bird offer.
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