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What Is the Future of Business Intelligence?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the keeping-track-of-the-cash-flow dept.

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."

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. The company I worked for already tried this... by poofmeisterp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It doesn't work. Surprised, huh? ;)

    The "dashboards" provided green/yellow/red status with click-through to actual data points.
    The execs spent so much time obsessing over the quality of data in the dashboards and fixing problems when they arose that they never got any actual use out of them.
    It just gives execs one more thing to complain about and blame on other people to get unreasonable performance gains (that in reality areperformance losses in the form of lowered morale and sabotage.)

  2. visualization helps to sell to C level execs by DoomDoom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to work for Computer Associates and on their flagship product Unicenter TNG. The way we managed to sell to the excutives was to show them the TNG visualization feature which was almost like a computer game - where you could fly in to your regional data center , view a maze of your servers , fly into a server and pick up an application to fix . Lots of very cool toys to do somthing you could do faster and more easily with a simpler GUI. The CEO/CIO/CFO loved the demo and signed off on the purchase but the system administrators never ever used that interface -- they stuck to command line or windows interfaces. The System admins didn't object as the software did provide a useful and important solution for them.

    Visualization can not be a goal in itself .The software has to go and do something useful to win favor with middle tier managers and administrators , who will be the ones actually using it.