The future of business intelligence

Jill Dyché, Partner, Baseline Consulting

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, Jill Dyche of Baseline Consulting discusses BI-enabling tools and the democratization of advanced analytics.

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

There are two trends coming. One is a new level of transparency of analytics for business users. Right now, usage levels go from basic reporting to OLAP slicing and dicing, to data mining, modeling and segmentation, and all the way up to knowledge discovery. As tools and algorithms improve, however, end users will employ the range of BI and advanced analytic functionality. We may soon see people mining data who know absolutely nothing about statistics. It’s the democratization of advanced analytics.

Another thing we will see is BI becoming more widely adopted into midsized and small businesses. Sophisticated BI capabilities are more likely to exist at larger companies, but the next five years will see more widespread BI usage across industries, revenue sizes and market share, irrespective of company size.

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

We will see more semantic capabilities, so we won’t need to have a common vocabulary for much of our data. For example, if you enter the word “revenue,” your BI tool will recognize that you’re talking about booked revenue, not billed revenue. So there won’t be the algorithmically complex navigation to really understand meaning.  

Another trend is the ability to manage data in a centralized, formalized fashion that will help organizations share data for BI across many levels. Most companies still haven’t delivered a truly enterprise-wide view of their businesses. There are challenges with BI tools and data – not only getting the data but cleaning, distributing and validating it. As we start propagating BI technologies horizontally to more and more organizations and more and more knowledge workers, the formalization of the data processes that support those BI capabilities becomes much more important as well.

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

Organizations should consider top-down data governance as a formal framework for policy making around data at the enterprise level. Data governance is really going to be critical because we are using data more strategically than ever.

They should also consider the bottom-up concept of investing in enabling tools. It’s no longer just about the platform; it’s about toolsets that enable data quality, data profiling, metadata exploration and semantic technology. These BI-enabling tools can help deploy data to the enterprise in a more sustainable way.

The epiphany for many companies occurs when a C-level executive asks, “How much are we spending on this big box we’re calling a data warehouse, and what are we getting for it?” From a requirements standpoint, organizations should understand what the data warehouse needs to be, what analytics it needs to support and what business programs it needs to enable. It isn’t about the data warehouse platform but the tools that surround it and the data that feeds it.

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

The rumors of huge market consolidation may or may not be true. What we’ve seen is more focus on functionality for the end user. Vendors aren’t necessarily selling as much to IT anymore, instead they’re talking about the business benefits of their technologies.

Many IT organizations spend a preternatural amount of time focusing on end-user toolsets at the expense of managing the data assets. Vendors are really looking at how to improve access to data, facilitate data integration, and give IT time to spend on more important tasks.

Vendors are starting to understand that they can accelerate the sales process and the accompanying revenues if they can have a business conversation around the value of their tools for a particular industry or market segment.

Bio: Jill Dyché is an internationally recognized author, speaker and business consultant. As partner and cofounder of Baseline Consulting, she has developed customer information strategies at companies including Verizon, American Express, Bank One, The Gap, and Charles Schwab. Her latest book, Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth with Evan Levy, offers a frank and uncensored look at Customer Data Integration (CDI) and how you can reach a single version of the truth.