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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."
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis
How many people use graphs, pie charts, etc. daily? Look at the newspaper and see how many are in the financial section. How many people have the default stock ticker in their AIM window?
Yeah, I thought so......these aren't the droids you are looking for, move along...
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Business intelligence is an oxymoron.
What they really need in business is to find that all-elusive step, y'know they one right before "4) Profit!"
Anyway, regarding visualization software (let's not get into the buzzword aspects of this concept), do you really think CEOs will use it? Half of them don't even use email yet (I hear one or two are known for having their secretaries print out their emails for them). They're notoriously technologically illiterate. I assume they'll remain that way until the next generation or two succeed them (ie. people that have grown up being computer literate).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
It sounds like the author had a list of key/buzz words and tried to squeeze a payday out of it... it's an old term paper trick as well. How did this dreck find its place into a publication?
Laws are for people with no friends.
I don't mean to be insulting, but many managers are twits, and no matter what kind of wonderful software they have access to they still have to use their own brains to interpret, understand, and apply the data presented.
;)
I take university courses in management, and am repeatedly awestruck by the sheer stupidity of some of my peers. Many of them graduate and go on to become rather useless business people.
Always remember, Incompetent People Rarely Know They Are
The CEU or press guy of a company that makes X tells us that in future, there will be a H U G E market for X, and X will be ubiquitous.
My my, we would be utter fools not to invest all our spare money in his dot-bomb, wouldn't we?
Sheesh.
Well then. Here we have a senior officer and founder of a dot-com that makes software to graphically analyze databases telling us how in the future information visualization will be the next hot thing. When google news does this, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the net. Slashdot, Press Releases for Nerds?
"Products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year."
There's nothing I love quite so much as business analysts telling us "for sure" what's going to be hot in three to five years. Either it's something so obvious no one can miss it (like "the Internet will be big!"), or else they're horribly wrong.
Anyone remember how "push" technology was going to be the Next Big Thing? How the real money on the Internet was pushing sports scores and stock tickers out to people so they could avaoid all that tiresome clicking? Remember the Wired cover story on Push? Well, I get the same feeling about "executive dashboards." Show me a man who has graph on his desktop showing up to the minute price trends on hog belly futures, and I'll show you a man ready to replicate the same mistakes that a million or so day traders made during the Internet bubble: having access to instant information doesn't mean you understand the information you're seeing.
The businesses which can benefit the most from real-time information have already implamented it, and not as "executive dashboards." Think of WallMart. Or the U.S. Army. But they're designed to flow the information as hard data to people who actually use the information, rather than as pretty graphs to executives. You want to empower people at all levels of your organization, not micromanage them.
Is visualization useful? Sure, that's why we have things like Visio, PowerPoint, and Keynote. But never mistake up-to-the-minute readouts of information for a true understanding of that underlying data.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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First, you have to make sure that your core data is good. The most useful way to organize it on the front end might not instantly show the best way for the CEO to see it on the back end. That means you have to translate that data (lists of order numbers, ordered products, persons ordering) into what the executive cares about (number of orders, products sold, money collected).
Whoops -- you have to find out what the executive cares about, don't you? And it might not be as simple as what he says he cares about. Are there any orders he doesn't want included -- samples, say? If some products are bundled, do we include the combined products as units, or unbundled? Is "money collected" just the cash we now have in the bank, or is it money we have been promised, or the expected revenue from what has been sold? Hopefully, the executive will find time to define his requirements this precisely.
Then you have to set up the system that can get your data from Point A to Point B. Easy if you are really certain what you are trying to answer. Not, if not.
Once that's done, then you can consider setting up a "dashboard" -- assuming you're sure that you can define the business precisely enough, and won't miss an important metric along the way, and the business won't change -- hasn't changed -- in the meantime.
I'm sure there are products that will make this process easier, but it's significant work for everyone involved. Although some of it could be automated, it will still require that the people setting it up actually THINK about what they are doing.
TSG