It`s hard to ignore the momentum in the field of business intelligence (BI) when in fact Gartner ranked BI as the highest technology priority among CIOs in 2006, and indicated that worldwide, licence revenue are expected to touch the $3 billion mark by the year 2009.
The reason for this is simple: BI is moving away from being an exclusive tool for a few users to a more flexible, affordable and accessible tool for a larger market. This is happening because of the driving need for an advanced solution which can offer faster and better insight into the business environment.
The need to manage unprecedented data growth, obtain data of the highest quality, increase collaboration and comply with complex compliance regulations are a few reasons that are driving the need for insight, based on substantiated evidence, rather than `gut feel`.
CIOs today are trying to make sense of the business, its environment and its customers, so that they can identify trends, quickly discover and explore new insights and relationships, and leverage them for the benefit of the organisation.
Enterprises are now looking for consolidation and standardisation of their data to address these requirements and in essence, it is BI technologies that do just that - drive the future of business.
As such, BI is no longer the exclusive domain of a few users in large enterprises that have had the budgets to spend on complex and expensive traditional tools. In general, companies appear to be making solid progress with BI and are beginning to understand the business value that such a solution can deliver. It is clear that the value and importance of improving quality and accessibility of enterprise data is more widely appreciated, not only at the executive level, but holistically.
There will, however, always be a few organisations that are reluctant to `buy` into the so-called market hype, but there are those that have embraced the concept of BI and are looking at what the industry terms BI 2.0, and beyond. BI 2.0 represents both a bold new vision and a fundamental shift in the way businesses can use information and create smarter processes. From integrating events and delivering insight to action without intervention in real-time, BI 2.0 has certainly evolved and is ever closer to providing useful information that ultimately impacts the business and the bottom line. Moreover, as businesses increasingly move towards cross-functional BI initiatives, it will consequently have a fundamental impact on the world of business intelligence.
So, when all is said and done, it is important to note that in the future, the capability requirements of business intelligence will increase in the same way that consumer and business expectations increase. It is therefore imperative that companies increase at the same pace or even faster to stay competitive and achieve the almost elusive BI - better insight.
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