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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.
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!!!
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 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
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