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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 the future, it will still be mythical...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
At Southwest Airlines, they call them cockpits, and they're specialized, so that the guy in charge of putting peanuts on airplanes gets a different view than the guy who's in charge of purchasing jet fuel.
Dang. I thought my job sucked.
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.....
Military intelligence has everything to with gatherering information and passing it on to those who are supposed to figure out how to use it. After all, we can't be stuck with that sort of intelligence the civilians use, can we =) ?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis.
Heck, that's true now. They're called graphs.
But it does bolster my prediction that in five years three nines or better of the pundents attempting to capitalize on our paradigms will be using lingustic chicanery to obsfucate their metheodology.
-- MarkusQ
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!!!
Compitent, in touch, gutsy middle management.
Many haven't worked with what they manage (UNIX, Windows, networking, accounting, QA, etc). Because of this they don't understand the day to day working of the people and products they manage.
They also need to be in touch. From my experience when the boss calls a meeting and asks us to tell him or her what we need to change nobody speaks up. We need management we feel we can talk to without fear of retribution. Also, they need to keep their ears open for the watercooler gossip they will never hear directly. It helps judge morale, allows them to quell or substantiate rumors and find out what the employees really think.
The last, and largest one, is gutsy. This means when the workers tell a manager something that he or she can't take care of directly they should have the guts to take it to their manager to help. I've seen too many managers who kiss ass and are afraid to put a small tarnish on their reputation to go to bat for their employees.
The problems we face now aren't with the technology, but with the people.
Hmmm, did they arrive at this figure based upon the pr0n industry?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
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.)
I figure that in the near future most businesses will become more integrated with the Internet. The potential for customers to order goods without ever leaving their home is a tremndous potential market that can only grow as more people (especially Americans) get online. Given the laws of the United States concerning "security" passed in the last few years, I disagree with the author's comment that data mining will become a thing of the past. Quite the opposite, I think that with more information becoming readily available on the Internet that data mining will be used even more to attempt to forecast customer's desires before they even start actively shopping. With increased computing capacity and faster Internet access, it should only make data mining that much easier.
Certainly data mining and "buisness intelligence" can save corporations advertising dollars, but what about the people who buck the trends? Advertisers will tap into the internet thanks to small businesses who could readily advertise for much less money to the whole world, if need be. Local mini-webs for individual cities like Yahoo sets up would be perfect places for such advertising. Sadly, I also predict that AOL and Microsoft will try to merge at some point soon to facilitate their own data mining practices and to try to control most of these local webs. Their offers of integrated services from web access to web navigation to easy-to-understand web tools are already one of their biggest selling points. I say try to merge because despite current politics and recent events there are still legal limits to corporate mergers.
Regardless, I think companies will try to start integrating more of the Internet into their business. Small businesses will start using data mining as the technologies behind it become more easily exploited. And larger computer companies will probably start trying to consolidate in order to offer their own browsers, OSes (Linux derivatives for the masses seems likely to compete with Billy), and internet connection services all in one package.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
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?
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
will be more industrial/commercial espionage. and in this america is so sadly behind.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
"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/
Seems like most of the predictions go something like this....
"Hot new technology 'A' will be widely adopted and a multi-billion dollar industry in the next 3-5 years." -- Bob Anonomous, CEO vaporwhere corp, a hot new technology 'A' startup.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
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.
.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.
Visualization can not be a goal in itself
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
I think you have a point, although some of the small number of geniuses available can probably design some visualization methods/tools/whatever that will allow the rest of us to make a little more sense of vast amounts of data without having to understand it in depth. After all, many business managers seem to get along just fine today without having the faintest clue about what's really going on in their business. Maybe the future of business technology is designing tools that will let managers think they have a big-picture dashboard system so they will leave the lower level folks alone to do things "the way they should be done." ;)
I wonder when (if?) we will get to the point where no human, no matter how talented or experienced, will be able to figure these things out? <insert sci-fi AI doom-and-gloom end - of - the - human - race - because - we - start - letting - machines - think - for - us speculation here>
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Select * from employees where clue > 0;
0 rows effected
Seems pretty clear to me.
That aside, the point no one has brought up yet is that having second by second analysis of your sales, et al. is completely useless UNLESS you are also able to make second by second changes to your business to compensate for them. It is sort of like having a wristwatch that displayed time in nanoseconds. Sure, nanoseconds exist, they allow very precise time measurements, and so on an so forth. But other than physics experiments, would we really use them? Not only that, but if management makes stupid decisions on a daily basis, what do you think they'll be like on a minute-to-minute one?
In my opinion, this is just more management crap that they're trying to sell to businesses. Their work has dried up from the boom years and they decided, "hey, here's a way we can do something that appears to be useful and make corporations pay a lot of money for our software and consulting!" In five years, I predict, these people will have fleeced the gullible and have moved on to the next "hot" fake trend.
IAAL
Unfortunately, few in the slashdot community are familiar with this segment of our industry. Even fewer appear to be encumbered by this lack of knowledge.
The terminology and concepts referred to in these articles are mostly old hat, and anyone who's good and has experience with:
- decision support systems (DSS)
- business intelligence (BI - similar to DSS)
- data warehousing
- ods
- data marts
- reporting
- balanced score-cards
- data mining
- personalization
- SPC
- management science
should be familiar with all of them. Even some folks who've implemented BI components within large ERP & CRM applications should be familiar with them.
None of the projections are revolutionary - and none appear terribly insightful. Let's walk thru them one at a time:
1. In five years 100m people will use visualization tools almost daily: can't speak to the numbers, but I would be surprised if a majority of computer-users aren't using analytic technology daily - without even realizing it. As far as visualization goes, we're starting to enter the 'dancing-dog' phase of visualization - when the technology is over-applied without any thought of the usability or business impacts. So, yeah - we might see quite a lot of use, but I don't think we'll see nearly so much successful use of it.
2. BI will save $200 billion a year: perhaps, but I doubt that enough users are sufficiently info-literate (not computer-literate!) to pull this one off. Still, even with the primitive skills that people have in this area, BI can make efficiency improvements.
3. In 2-3 years quarterly-adjustments will be ditched in favor of real-time ones. The use of real-time analytics is increasing, though slowly. Micro-adjustments in pricing is only slowly be introduced, anything larger will continue to be adjusted on a quarterly basis - since it involves organizational changes - and people can't sustain real-time changes.
4. In 5 years BI & data mining terms will disappear: this is the one projection that I haven't heard before, and it seems the least likely. Both are essential prerequisites to embedding analytics in applications - since they help identify the rules, algorithms, etc to be used real-time. BI is also useful along-side analytical applications - since it allows you to measure what the real-time app is up to.
My own predictions? Analytics are definitely going to become more embedded into applications. More importantly however - people will become more accustomed to, and more comfortable with the basic concepts. And that's the real pre-requisite to making progress here. After all, the challenges to making better decisions based upon quantitive methods aren't technological - they're social. You need people who are info-literate, people who care, and organizations willing to question themselves. *That's* the real challenge!
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?
There's a book well-known in the humanities, Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim, arguing that thinking is essentially visual. But most of the people working in cognitive science don't believe this, but instead that thinking is essentially linguistic (even if it's in something different from our public languages, such as Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought - where the most he'll give to visualization is that it can be an "image over a description").
... enough said.
Or perhaps visual and linguistic intelligence both exist in their own right, but some cultures do better at one or the other? If so, we're still a culture built on "In the beginning was the Word." We think we're so visual because of movies and whatever, but compared to the visual immersion of a traditional tribal, forest culture in its heyday we're nowhere with vision. So what does it do if we get a bunch of executives "visualizing"? Does it really make them smarter than if they work out their decisions logically, in language, in the traditional way of our culture? Or is it just a new way of dressing up the yes-men?
Even to the extent that we can importantly visualize, what gives you the clearer, more vital vision, a well crafted book - just words - or a comic? Because, let's face it, what software provides is at best like a cheap comic. And if financial markets are the measure of how bright visualization tools make us
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Is that the big companies (Cognos, IBM, Microsoft, and others) sell their slick products very well (hell I used to do it too) to the CEOs and executives. Unfortunately, those slick visualization tools require a HUGE amount of planning and organization in order to produce a single slick graph and/or chart.
Actual data marts or (god forbid) data warehouses which span information from disparate sources require expert project management and control, not to mention buy-in from all departments. Let's not gloss over the security issues, data retention, extraction, and a cornicopia of problems along with it.
Most of these companies get in the door through the following ways:
1. Slick sales
2. The loathed "proof of concept" in which they take some snippet of your data and create a cube which is just good enough to sell the rest of the product.
3. Exaggerated promises
Let's face it - very few companies have 'clean' data out there, and the required work to make dimensions stretch across the enterprise is mind-numbing. Then, just as you have it down and finished, some department installs an upgrade, or switches a product, and you have to redesign your dimensions and ETL all over again. Woohhoooo!
**sigh** I love BI, but companies typically just don't get the actual investment you have to make in order to get those great graphs and drill-downs.
&J