A mobile democracy

Fewer vendors, less licence revenue but more users. That's the unique situation in the business intelligence (BI) market right now. Very few niche players remain to be gobbled up by the giants, but current licence revenues are dropping on average as BI becomes more democratised and moves onto more desktops.

What does it mean for the future of BI? And what about the race to provide decent mobile BI applications? Will the cellphone become the BI dashboard platform of choice?

On the democratisation question, Goran Dragosavac, BI practice lead at SAS, says it's a good thing. "Today, with a few clicks, someone can create a very advanced data model. Of course, it still needs interpretation and implementation but it is a big step forward in analytics."

Hedley Hurwitz, MD of Magix Integration, says the front-end may be turning into a commodity but what he's seen of the back-end certainly isn't.

"The challenge around the front-end and the presentation layer is that it's being democratised," says Hurwitz, "but getting the information correct at the back-end is getting more complex."

Davide Hanan, MD of Qlikview SA, says that both sides are becoming more simplified.

"On both fronts, we're moving towards significant simplification, mainly because it's demanded by consumers but also because it's becoming possible. In our experience outside the work environment, we are all empowered. We can go to Google, ask any questions and get back the answers we want. Oddly enough, we don't have that same power in the work environment."

Executives don't care whether they get it on a cellphone, an iPad or a piece of paper.

Ashleigh Theophanides, Deloitte

But not all back-ends are simple, notes principal consultant at PBT David Logan.

"The example of Google shows that the user demands a simple front-end but it doesn't necessarily simplify the back-end. I don't think anyone can replicate Google's algorithms very easily. What we're seeing at our clients is them investing in design at the back-end to make the front-end simpler."

Mark Bannerman, country manager of MicroStrategy, agrees and says this is an opportunity.

"The complexity at the customer is getting larger and larger and so they're looking for narrower or more effective ways to be better than the company next door. As long as there is some way to create competitive advantage, there's never going to be simplicity everywhere. Companies that can find solutions for their customers and create advantage will be driving BI for the next five years."

But there's still a gap between the BI ideal and real-world practice in SA. Fiona Ridgewell, service delivery manager at Fujitsu, notes that strategy management is far more about people than technology.

"I think we need to take the people factor into consideration. Performance and strategy management based on what you get from BI systems are not really about technology, but about change management and people management."

And then there's the gulf between what the brochure says and what the reality is.

Greg Bogiages, MD of Cortell, says there's a disparity between practice and theory. "In my interactions with financial officers, the reality is they're not getting the information they require," he says. "They're telling us that they're not getting close to what they require to make decisions. They're drowning in data but it's not what they need."

Andre Cloete, divisional director of BI at AccTech Systems, has also seen the reality. "My background is financial reporting and what we've found is that self-service BI sounds very nice but we're pretty far away from it. There's no way a customer can sit with any kind of technology and immediately get an answer."

Not to mention that the maturity and effectiveness of organisations vary, both within and without. Comments Deloitte's director of actuarial and insurance Ashleigh Theophanides. "Different organisations have different levels of maturity when it comes to both information within their organisations and their ability to use it to align them strategically. Whether it's finance, procurement, HR or managing people, it's like looking at a whole bowl of Smarties of different colours and picking the right one for a business.

“I know a very large financial services organisation that doesn't know how many people they employ. It's ridiculous; their business is based on analysing data yet the HR function cannot tell them how many people are working for them."

Estelle de Beer, practice manager at BI Practice, says in a sense everything has changed about BI and yet nothing has changed.

"I'm very excited about the commoditisation of BI and the mobile aspects of BI. I can go to a meeting with my iPad, run reports and be using the same data as is on my company network. The mobilisation of BI is exposing the data to a larger user community and driving a demand that is different from what's gone before but what it's also doing is exposing the fact that the data isn't ready. We're pushing the mobile BI message but we end up in integration projects."

Qlikview's Hanan says the issue of data quality is often raised as a reason to slow down the adoption of BI or sometimes to blame BI implementations for failure.

They're drowning in data but it's not what they require.

Greg Bogiages, Cortell

"That's something I don't accept," he says. "Data quality is a good reason to put in BI; you can use BI tools to address data quality problems. The business person can make the decisions rather than IT. What hasn't changed about BI is the need to inform people about their businesses so they can make better decisions. But the process has changed dramatically. Moving away from the report and towards something dynamic on an iPhone or an iPad allows me to make a decision quicker."

Sean Paine, COO EnterpriseWorx, says data quality benefits from the feedback loop.

"The democratisation of BI has accelerated the process of data quality improvement. The quicker you get BI put in and the quicker you get feedback from the users, the better your data becomes."

Is mobile the next frontier for business intelligence? The explosion in adoption of tablets and large-screen smartphones has many IT vendors scrambling to provide mobile versions of their offerings and BI is no different.

Andy Potter, solution sales head at Asyst Intelligence, says although South African companies are not lagging too far behind when it comes to embracing mobile technologies, they still have to get to grips with what mobile BI technologies can do for them.

“A lot of businesses have invested in BI solutions that have a mobile component but they aren't using the features. We are at the tipping point where companies are mature enough in their use of BI tools and their employees are up to speed in terms of their use of mobile devices. More companies are now starting to investigate how they can leverage mobile BI to interact with and empower mobile workers.”

Gerhard Botha, principal BI lead at IS Partners, says it's mainly an empowerment phenomenon.

"Delivering tools to mobile platforms makes it easier for people to ask questions and the questions that people are asking now are becoming more complicated. Lots of these tools can't deliver that. How do we answer complex questions? Previously the tools were just reporting on the bottom line but these days people want to delve deeper and do cross-functional analysis."

SAS' Dragosavac says social media analysis will have to play a role in the future.

"Some of the most interesting data doesn't sit in organisations and is not owned by them or even in a format that can be easily analysed. Social media, for example: who is talking about us? What are they saying? New-generation BI tools will have to be able to answer that."

Self-service BI is nice but we're pretty far away from it.

Andre Cloete, AccTech

PBT's Logan says mobile technology transforms BI.

"The key to mobile BI is that it turns traditional BI into conversational BI. Instead of getting an e-mail saying a report has been updated, you're walking around with a mobile device that has the latest report. And there's more we could do with visualisation as well. As BI professionals, we sometimes dump the data on people's desktops without turning it into a story or a picture."

How do companies get there? Steven Joffe, director of performance management at Softworx, says it's a natural systems evolution based on the needs of business users.

"A lot of immature businesses look at BI from an IT perspective. It's an IT system and it's looked after by IT. But you have to look at the business users and ask what they want.

“When you go through that exercise, you can see how it develops. It they have nothing, you look at putting in reporting. If they have reporting, you look at planning. If they have planning, there are other different variations you can look at. And part of that is the mobile side. Social media is how the community interacts. Everyone has Facebook or LinkedIn and it's how everyone interacts and transacts - it's the way the world is going."

But sometimes the correct route is the simpler one. The BI Practice's De Beer says a client of hers cut to the chase.

"Sometimes we believe our own brochures too often and think everyone wants a sophisticated drill-down, multiple-screen solution. But we've had a CEO say he wants an SMS in the morning with his five KPIs and that's all he needs."

Deloitte's Theophanides agrees.

"Why does BI matter? In the instances I've seen where it's worked, BI has allowed the companies to make

decisions today to shape their companies tomorrow. Executives don't care how simple or complex the process is as long as they can make decisions. Other than that, I don't think they care whether they get it on a cellphone, iPad or a piece of paper."

Adds Knowledge Integration Dynamics' Julian Field: "Eighty percent of the work we do and deliver is enterprise reporting. We analyse data and deliver a static report. On the desktop, we can do some analytics but in general what we do is enterprise reporting.

“The challenge we have is to change that into advanced analytics and that's where we have to take our businesses. What's new in BI? Not a lot. We can put it on the iPad but the basics are still that people are making decisions based on analysis."