During 2015, ITWeb, in partnership with YoungBlood Consultants, conducted a Business Intelligence (BI) survey to gauge the relevance of the classical business intelligence value proposition in the face of a rapidly changing data environment.
"Through the survey we found that the classical value proposition was still highly relevant - data warehouses still need to provide one source of the truth and strong visualisations must make insight visible. We also found though that increasingly in South Africa these classical approaches are starting to meld with the analytical, statistical and big data environment," says Glen Ansell, Sales Director at YoungBlood Consultants.
This trend was seen as highly relevant, although actual uptake and spend had yet to reflect it, he continues.
"This year our starting point is still that the whole world of data is changing," he adds.
On this note, ITWeb, in partnership with YoungBlood Consultants, is once again conducting an online Business Intelligence survey during September, this time to determine which of the new aspects of change are having an impact in our market.
Ansell believes that a major wave of convergence is under way, which is accelerating with the meteoric rise of the Internet of things (IOT).
Operational Technology (OT), which is the monitoring and control of processes by means of instrumentation and physical devices, has always been the domain of process engineers and not IT practitioners, he points out.
"The IT/OT convergence can be found in logistics, insurance and health care, but integrating OT brings new challenges to the BI practitioner. OT architectures and are highly proprietary and can be inaccessible to enterprise's BI practitioners. Transaction rates can be high, which can overwhelm infrastructures. And security in the OT environment is often rudimentary," he explains.
"Industries grappling with this are mine and mineral processing, production line automation, fire and hazard management and many others. Information technology is technically defined as applying to all forms of computerised data, but is generally applied to transactional systems, i e anything that could fall into the ERP category. These systems have seldom integrated or even exchanged data with OT systems."
Data enrichment is also challenging, states Ansell. It has been generally thought about as a form of data cleaning used for requirements such as address correction or content interpretation.
"Typically this would need a normalisation process to get formats standardised, followed by extraction algorithms. However, new ways are developing of thinking about data, by enriching transactional data with that from other sources."
With regards to data partnerships, Ansell notes the data partnership between Facebook and Whatsapp. These are two separate (although mutually owned) organisations that exchange data with the purpose of enhancing the customer experience.
He elaborates: "The world is filled with specialist pockets of data ownership, pertaining to every aspect of human life. The exchange of data, either purchased or for mutual data enrichment, is becoming increasingly exploited by market leaders. However this thinking hasn't yet started amongst many companies, and there is a real risk to them that a key differentiator and market advantage may be seized by a competitor."
He believes business intelligence has usually reacted to changing environments, rather than being an agent for change in its own right.
"Perhaps it is a good moment for BI architects and practitioners to take a peek into the future, and to start pre-empting the technical challenges that will arise over this watershed period, in data collection, storage, visualisation, security and integration," Ansell concludes.
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