Technology convergence will overturn widely accepted business intelligence (BI) practices.
This is according to international keynote speaker Timo Elliott, BI veteran at SAP BusinessObjects, who spoke at the ITWeb BI Summit 2011 held at Vodaworld this week.
He said despite improvements made to BI methodologies in the past 20 years, technology has advanced to such a point that BI needs to take a leap forward in order to catch up.
“Traditional BI today is often perceived as slow, painful and expensive. However, this is an opportunity for new technologies to change the situation.”
One of the technologies Elliott highlighted was 'in-memory BI'; which accesses data a million times faster than disk. He said in-memory BI costs have plummeted in recent months, which will further drive its adoption.
“In-memory BI provides efficient data storage in much less space than traditional row-based databases,” explained Elliott.
Another technology that has influenced BI is cloud computing. Elliott said the power of the cloud lies in its ability to access databases from anywhere, as well as accessing and collaborating with unstructured and personal data via mobile devices.
He said many business users say BI tools are too difficult to navigate and use, explaining that the complexity of BI comes in where data comes from multiple information sources.
Simplifying BI
According to Elliott, the biggest change to the BI industry has been driven by mobile and tablet devices. “The Apple iPad is an adapted device for analysis and provides interactive benefits that PCs cannot offer. He reckons BI on mobile devices provides insight on the go.
Elliott said the biggest challenge for the BI market is achieving data quality, which he said needs to be continuously monitored on a real-time basis.
“It's very important to add collaboration on top of BI to avoid bad analysis. We are moving to business-focused analysis that integrates risk, financial systems, best practice libraries, performance, compliance and strategy management in one platform.”
Bill Hoggarth, head of BI at CQS Holdings, concurred with Elliot, saying if the BI community doesn't improve on traditional thinking and architecture, there will be a crisis and business won't be able to access clean data.
“Nobody expected the vast scenario of data that BI experts have to manage today, and with this huge amount of data volumes comes complexity.”
Hoggarth said end-users are used to information-rich environments where a search phrase can be entered into Google as a simple and intuitive way of getting access to information.
He said BI needs to adapt to the consumer method of accessing data from any source in order to solve business problems.
“Business needs to respond to the reality of a changing consumer environment in order to recognise the basic premise of BI to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time and right cost,” said Hoggarth.
Long way to go
Hoggarth indicated that BI is a 100 billion-dollar global industry, yet still has a long way to go before realising true business value from data. “We are a long step away from doing proper BI based on the vast amount of unstructured data.
“It's not about making what we've got faster, but enhancing our traditional thinking. We need to start the journey, otherwise we will just be another data source where business consumers get their information outside of the data warehouse.”
Hoggarth pointed out that BI is not just about technology; it's about what information is required to enhance business value. Both Hoggarth and Elliott claimed there isn't a single vendor which has the full BI technology stack.
Hoggarth said: “We have to train business consumers what the information really means. Stop being driven by data, and rather be driven by what information the business needs to execute its growth strategies.”
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