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What Is the Future of Business Intelligence?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Mitch Betts asked this question to many technology leaders in the field of business intelligence. Here is one selected prediction. 'In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year,' says Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Check this column for more forecasts and an update on the adoption of so-called 'executive dashboards.' You also can read the original Computerworld article for even more information."
I undertand this, and I think I know what they are talking about when they mention the estimates. Business Intelligence is a large and all-encompassing field, I've been working as a consultant in this particular industry for three and a half years. Business spending on BI systems incorporates the entire lifecycle of such implementations, not just simple pretty graphs at the end. It includes areas such as Business Analysys which consists of requirement gathering, Data modelling for designing optimal storage for large volumes of historical data, ETL and Data Warehousing, then once you have a solid foundation for your decision support system (DSS) you can proceed onto the reporting and analytics and presentation.
Do I believe it is a large industry with a lot of spending, yes I do. Especially in these times where businesses are attempting to optimize their processes and reduce spending. Decision support systems through Business Intelligence are a big aide to those in charge.
Regards,
Tom Wolniewicz; BMath, CS, OCP
tom@fieldofwebs.com
Not to make too big of a shameless plug, but my www.knowledgebooks.com stuff tries to be sort-of competitive with Inxight (although I have just been working on this stuff about 1/3 time for a few years - I will acknowledge that they have a head start :-).
I really believe that most people will routinely use what I would call information appliances - systems that basically remember our entire digital lives and provide ways to quickly find information based on topic, time of creation/modification, linked from other similar data or experiences, etc.
One huge problem that I have as a developer (as I have recently talked about on my blog) is that if you are not Microsoft and can not peek inside proprietary data and file formats, then you have a difficult time writing software that runs in the background and has access to everything that you are doing on your computer. Storage, information retrieval, backups, etc. are all solveable problems, but proprietary data formats used by > 90% of the desktop market are a major problem.
One possible idea would be integration with OpenOffice and live with a small market share.
-Mark
It's called OLAP or multidimensional analysis and its been here for a long time, thing is hardly anyone uses it. Various figure suggest 90% of Business analysists have never used OLAP tools to any degree.
As someone who spends to much time using Cognos' stuff and BusinessObjects, the one thing I can tell these things lack is decent charting. Excel has them both beat here and in the end its charts the bosses look at not the tables.
The Christianity Meme was made wide spread by the invention of the Gutenberg press. Bwahahahahahaha. BWAHAHAHAHAH> *gasp* *gasp* MAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You realize that almost all of Europe was Christian for about 1000 years before Gutenberg?