Users want new approach to BI

For many in the IT sector, business intelligence (BI) is a relatively new concept, something that's been around for perhaps two decades. However, as with so many current technology enablers that seem new, BI has been around for a long time. Fifty years, in fact.

It was Germany's Hans Peter Luhn who coined the term in 1958 when he wrote: "Business is a collection of activities carried on for whatever purpose, be it science, technology, commerce, industry, law, government, defence, etc. The communication facility serving the conduct of a business (in the broad sense) may be referred to as an intelligence system. The notion of intelligence is also defined here, in a more general sense, as 'the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.'”

It would be 31 years more before Gartner analyst Howard Dresner brought the term into popular use, defining it as "concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems".

The purpose of this history lesson is to emphasise that BI is not new; for decades organisations have been subject to the Drip factor: they are data rich, information poor. With ever-increasing stridency and claims of silver bullets, vendors have tried to address the Drip factor. By and large, they have failed.

Part of the reason is that operational systems are excellent at acquiring, generating, aggregating and storing data. But, from relational databases to today's monolithic ERP systems, they have been singularly bad at providing management with a meaningful view at the information implicit in that data.

This fact has led to a Tower of Babel of tools and technologies to convert data into information, which can then be interrogated in such a way as to provide management with insight. This Tower of Babel comprises a bewildering array of layers:

* Metadata, data profiling and data quality initiatives, laying a foundation for proper and well structured data. Latest fad here is master data management, or MDM.
* Extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), the process that ensures data is normalised and consistent.
* The design and delivery of a data warehouse, with supporting data marts, each for a specific subject area. Often the data marts today are individual OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes.
* Front-end tools, scorecards and dashboards with which to view the data in the data marts or cubes.

Now management has the tools it needs, doesn't it? Users should be happy, shouldn't they?

So why do we still need educational sessions, in-depth training, change management disciplines? Why is IT still tied up for hours each day designing reports for users who decades into the discipline of BI still don't really know what they want, can't articulate their needs and need a degree in computer science if they want to bypass IT?

Why is user take-up industry-wide still stuck at under 10%?

Why is IT still tied up for hours each day designing reports for users who decades into the discipline of BI still don't really know what they want?

Corey Springett is strategic business manager at Progress Software South Africa.

It's because BI is too costly and hard to do. Presented with the above hierarchy of tools and technologies, is it any wonder users go their own way and use spreadsheets instead?

There is a better way, and it's operational BI (OBI), as I've discussed in previous Industry Insights. OBI makes query as easy as the language users speak. If they can speak English, they can ask the questions to which they need answers.

So now standard users can access the information they need, using the same techniques they use with Web search. Power users can still ask complex questions, and drill down into underlying systems to gain deeper insight and ask what-if questions, and follow deductive and inductive lines of reasoning.

And they can get their answers back in far less time than traditional BI applications, at a lower cost, and with less complexity than any traditional IT shop is used to.

For any organisation frustrated with its current BI track record and return on investment, OBI offers an easier, more impactful way forward.

And the users will love it!

* Corey Springett is strategic business manager at Progress Software South Africa.