The Future of Business Intelligence

Keith Collins, Chief Technology Officer, SAS

Over the past few months, we conducted interviews with SAS executives, industry experts and leading research analysts – asking each the same set of questions about the role of business intelligence (BI) in the next two to five years. Here, Keith Collins, Chief Technology Officer at SAS, talks about the platform definition of BI and the increasing demand for intelligence.

What is your vision of how business intelligence will be used two to five years from now?

Within five years, business intelligence will be seen as a required and integral part of the IT infrastructure that businesses can’t survive without. By this time, business units will have forced the issue of needing Business Intelligence Competency Centers to unite the data and intelligence efforts across the organization. Also, within five years, individual units will no longer be quibbling about who owns the data. It will be a strategic asset of the corporation. Finally, I can’t overstate the importance of data integration and the impact that master data management will have on enterprises. It will fundamentally change the quality of the information across not just BI systems but all operational systems. And it is likely going to fundamentally change the way we design data warehouses to allow us to focus more of our design on the decision science as opposed to operational reporting.

What capabilities will be widely available in BI solutions of the future?

A new platform definition is emerging for business intelligence, where BI is no longer defined as simple query and reporting. The new definition describes BI as a platform for data integration, analytics and information deployment. This actually is much closer to the original 1989 definition coined by Gartner. The Gartner analysts predicted a shift toward integrating performance management interfaces with a business intelligence platform underneath to provide the analysis and the facts. In the next few years, we’ll also see a shift in performance management to what we’re calling predictive performance management, where analytics play a huge role in moving us beyond just simple metrics to more powerful measures. We hear a lot of talk about KPIs, but KPIs by themselves only help you measure a state. How do you know if you’re really moving the needle? Have you asked the right question? What are you benchmarking it against, if you will? These types of questions will be more active in our everyday lives.

What should organizations be doing now to help lay the foundation for long-term BI strategies?

I really think this move around Business Intelligence Competency Centers is a big step in the right direction. We can provide the technology and provide some coaching, but the organization has to enable its employees to make use of the actual information they derive. If they aren’t providing the levers to change the business, then the investment in technology is of no value. Organizations must know how to ask the right questions. You don’t have to know how to write the codes anymore; we have eliminated that problem. But we can’t eliminate knowing how to ask the right questions. As the demand for intelligence increases, there’s going to be a skills gap, and organizations that understand and learn to leverage that across their organization are going to be further ahead. 

How might the BI vendor landscape change in the next two to five years?

We will coninue to see consolidation of the traditional query and reporting vendors. Vendors like SAS, Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft will play a larger role in the market. Our strategy to provide a seamless platform for data integration, analytics and information deployment with suites of analytic solutions will continue to provide strong differentiation between SAS and other vendors.