The future of business intelligence

Cindi Howson, President, ASK

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, Cindi Howson, President of Analytic Solution Know-How (ASK), talks about finding answers to difficult questions with BI.

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

Five years from now, I’d like to see BI become as common and easy to use as a telephone, iPod or Tivo. Typically, only 25 percent of employees within a company have BI licenses right now. It should be closer to 100 percent. Companies that consider their projects really successful have BI licenses for 41 percent of their employees on average. There is a correlation between success, ease of use and relevance. So if we improve that, BI will become an everyday tool. Thinking back to the early 1990s, not every user had a computer. Now, you no longer have to make the business case for why everyone needs one. BI is going in that same direction, but there are a few issues to solve before we get there. Right now, there are questions that are so complex that experts are called in to answer them. Decision makers need to be able to ask and answer simple questions themselves, with analyses that can be done in days, not months.

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

Users will be able to access BI from any Internet connection, which we’re already close to achieving with a number of vendors. Also, there will be more visualization and integration within the programs that customers are already using, such as Excel and PowerPoint. Searching within BI applications should become faster and more intuitive, giving users the ability to enter a question and automatically find the answers they’re looking for.

Right now, there’s also a mentality that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. If you look at decision making, people sometimes ask certain questions because they have preconceived notions about what’s important. Maybe they’re looking at the wrong things. Improvements in BI should be able to help point you toward the right focus areas and the right questions.

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

Organizations should focus more on information processes and decision-making processes so that BI becomes easy enough and relevant enough to use. Forty-two percent of companies are still doing BI on a departmental basis. Moving to an enterprise focus should be a priority. Continue to empower the departments, but shift the roles so a central IT group provides the infrastructure, the discipline and the set of supported tools – but then ensure the individual business units or departments are empowered to leveraging the capabilities and tailor them to their unique requirements.

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

With the leading players, there will continue to be some consolidation. Having four or five market leaders is a good thing for customers, along with the niche players, which is where the innovation tends to originate.

Bio: Cindi Howson is President of ASK, a BI consultancy, and publishes the BIScorecardTM product reviews.