The Future of Business Intelligence

Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO, 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, Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, talks about the evolution of BI and the importance of investing in people with strong problem-solving skills

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

Until recently, business intelligence was limited to basic query and reporting, and it never really provided that much intelligence. Now that SAS is actively involved, we’re really raising the bar as far as what you can actually use business intelligence for.

With the amount of information doubling every year, it’s a constant struggle to make sure that your information systems are keeping up with it and keeping up with all the possibilities of what you can do with all that data.

Some of our leading financial services customers have more than a thousand models in place for making decisions on a daily basis, and they have all the latest information included in those models – even textual data from call centers in some cases. So we are going to see a lot more of that: a lot more real-time decision making and much higher degrees of analytics involved within business intelligence.

In the near future, when executives sit down at their desks in the morning, they will look at their latest performance metrics before they check their e-mail. But if you have a hundred key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’re keeping track of – and many companies will require that many – you’ll really need an alert mechanism. We are going to see a lot more analytics-driven automation in general, and we’ll tie that into information delivery tools, so we can warn people about areas of concern and areas that might cause concern in the future. Of course, these KPIs will be truly reflective of business performance and analytically derived, so people won’t be bothered unnecessarily with false alerts – because we already have enough interruptions in the day!

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

Our products will include more real-time capabilities. We’re developing product capabilities now that will continue to make it easier to push information to business users in context and in real time. The difference between our real-time capabilities and our competitors’ is a matter of doing smart things faster versus doing not-so-smart things faster. Even our real-time applications will continue to be more analytically driven, as opposed to guessing or applying educated guesses or simple business rules on the fly.

We’re also making it easier for business users to deploy our models in real time and from any online device. This concept of a service-oriented architecture isn’t new but is just really taking hold. For IT, it means creating a single platform for delivering information in many different ways to many different users, depending on their needs. For business users, it means finding the answers they need automatically from whatever application they’re used to working in every day. It’s all about getting the answers you need automatically when you need them with the confidence that the analyses are thorough and based on the most up-to-date data.  

Really, it’s just one step further in the evolution of BI. In the past, business users had to request answers and wait for someone else to do the analyses. Now, they can get the answers themselves if they know where to go and how to use the application that provides the intelligence. In the near future, they won’t have to do even that. The answers will come to them automatically via the interfaces and applications they’re already using every day.

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

They should be investing in an enterprisewide platform, not just individual point solutions for each department. They really need to take a long look at some of the BI tools they might be using currently and consider how they are going to grow. Are they going to have all the analytics available when the time comes and be able to provide answers right now? Frankly, if you’re not using SAS, you may not be achieving the level of performance your competitors are.

Of course, it will still be vitally important to invest in people with strong problem-solving skills. There will continue to be a strong need for people who have experience in exploratory data analysis and predictive modeling. This is essential to understanding how to automate processes well and knowing when the approach needs to change so the automation stays current. Companies that “automate and forget” may eventually be doing things faster but not better – in some cases, they may even be doing damage. We’re partnering with universities now to make sure there are sufficient numbers of people who know best practices as embodied in our software, so the companies who want to be at the forefront of decision making in the future can find people with the skills to do that.

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

BI vendor consolidation will happen. There is a lot of talk about how consolidation scenarios will play out. Cognos likely will be bought by IBM. Business Objects is probably going to be folded into Oracle. I don’t know who’s going to buy MicroStrategy or where Hyperion is going. But IBM is in acquisition mode right now, so I would think there’s a pretty good chance that both Hyperion and Cognos might end up with IBM. The truth of the matter is that several of these companies have tried to broaden their product offerings by re-architecting products that were not meant to work together. It takes time and money to do that, and customers are not going to be happy to bear those costs and pitfalls. SAS integrated its offerings from the beginning, so we have not had to face those issues. Microsoft is also making a lot of noise around BI, but everything I see points to more sales of Office and SQL Server, not products that help companies achieve strategic business intelligence. SAS will still be standing as a strong independent vendor after the consolidation. The other vendors will still lack all the incredible analytical and information management capabilities that we have – all the modeling capabilities that add ongoing ROI. Analytics provide that differentiation that companies need.