The evolution of BI

Business intelligence (BI) means different things to different people.

To try and obtain a meaningful baseline, I thought it would be useful to look at the evolution of BI: where it has come from, how it has evolved, and where it stands today.

In reviewing the evolution of BI, where does one start? The players, the business needs, convergence (we are all converging now), the link between structured and unstructured data, the changes in hardware and Moore's Law?

The drivers will tell us where the market is going. Choosing the drivers to focus on is not that easy, so I will try, perhaps ambitiously, to cover the majority of them in this series. They will be organised, hopefully, in a logical structure.

A good starting point is a definition of BI. The definition will provide some clarity on where the market is going and help clear out any clutter, hype, jargon and confusion.

One version of the truth. The right information to the right person in the right time. Yawn. Heard it all before, ad infinitum. We were hyping this up years ago and thought we were clever then.

Now we have a somewhat jaundiced view of the world and how silly users keep on breaking the solution, or worse still, not using it properly or at all. BI, as with any area of IT, is a services business. It is there to make life easier and the only reason we do it is to support what we are already doing, and drive operational efficiencies.

Before anybody asks about strategy execution and planning, I will come back to that when I address the definitions later. I started with MIS (management information systems), then went to decision support and here I am in BI. I still like the term decision support. After all, what I do is provide information to support people in making decisions. It is simple and still holds true.

To plagiarise one of my colleagues, I move data from A to B to make analysis and reporting easier. It still speaks to decision support, but is perhaps slightly more descriptive. The fundamental truth is I provide information to business users to support them in making decisions, hopefully intelligent ones.

What I do is provide information to support people in making decisions. It is simple and still holds true.

Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones Systems.

That is the market I am servicing: the factors that are influencing it are both internal and external. The internal factors are people, process and data. The external factors are other businesses and their need for information, and the vendors: technology.

I will focus on the tangibles and measurable in this series of Industry Insights, otherwise I will be writing a book and annoy far more people than I intend to. To sum people up - they are difficult, susceptible to hype, resistant to change and they like Microsoft Excel. Data is generally dirty and needs to be cleanish to be used for making decisions.

Having said that, waiting to clean your data before moving forward with BI is fine if your customers, competitors and the markets are polite enough to wait for you while you do it, which is unlikely. So, in my simplistic world, that leaves process and the vendors as market drivers.

I will make my first wild sweeping generalisation here and suggest the two market drivers are the vendors and the automation of the decision support process. Vendors tell everybody you need their software to do the job right, and the business needs improved access to information to make better decisions. Hopefully the twain will meet, at more increasingly frequent intervals.

* In the next Industry Insight in this series, I will talk about the vendors and their influence on the sector.

* Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones Systems.