The Future of Business Intelligence

Jim Davis, Chief Marketing 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, Jim Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at SAS, talks about recognizing data as an asset and going mobile with BI. 

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

Currently, there is a move for BI to become more strategic for an organization. Probably three-fourths of the organizations employing BI today are still in the midst of consolidating and integrating data. In the next three to five years, we’ll reach a tipping point where more organizations will be using BI to focus on how to optimize processes and influence the bottom line. Finally, more organizations will move beyond optimization and become committed to developing new products and services through the use of BI. When organizations recognize data as an asset that is critical to their success, for example, they can begin to look at new lines of business. They may have been producing widgets for the last 30 years, but with BI, they’ll be able to recognize when they have opportunities to create new product lines and expand their top-line capabilities. 

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

First, I think we need to talk about what BI is and what it isn’t. There is an old definition of BI, which is the query and reporting definition and describes the fact that you’ve given a user independence from IT. The future of BI involves things like consistency of information across the organization and predictive analytics that will support proactive decision making. Now, marry that with some of the technology developments and infrastructure issues that are taking place around us globally. Wi-Fi is becoming prevalent, for example, so you’re not going to be tethered to a desk. BI already is mobile, but it’s going to become even more mobile, and people are going to be comfortable with it. So the opportunity to get BI closer to the point of interaction will be realized. We are going to be on the road with BI. We are going to be in the client’s conference room with BI. We are going to be on the factory floors with BI. We are going to be out there where the action is.

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

If you want to look at what the future of BI can do for an organization, you’re going to have to handle some of the soft issues as well. Successful organizations will recognize BI as more than a technology issue, and this is where people, process and culture come into play. Do you have people who are committed to fact-based decision making? Do you have programs in place to keep the skill sets current? Do they have processes in place to make data readily available? Do you have a culture that’s going to take on the change necessary to adopt a culture of fact-based decision making? Most importantly, does your organization not only accept change, but does it also go out and look for change and then embrace it? Those companies that are able to harness data and commit to the fact-based decision making are the ones that are going to be quicker in the market and ultimately have competitive advantage.

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

We are going to see a consolidation of the pure-play BI vendors. And this is the old definition of BI that we talked about, involving vendors for the query and reporting tools and the pre-presentation layers. Over the next 12 months, we’re going to see them acquired by some larger players. These old-definition BI vendors are merely deployment mechanisms for much richer information. SAS is in a very good position because we own the rich information space, and what we can do with data integration and analytics is unrivaled.