The future of business intelligence

Claudia Imhoff, President and Founder, Intelligent Solutions

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, Claudia Imhoff, President and Founder of Intelligent Solutions, talks about business intelligence competency centers and ubiquitious BI. 

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

BI will become more ubiquitous within the operations of most organizations. We won’t lose any of the traditional strategic or long-term types of BI but will see business intelligence and on-demand analytics enter more into the actual operational procedures and processes. For example, the ability to predict how customers will behave, how we treat them and whether they’re about to leave will become faster and more refined as BI is integrated into operations. Another prime example of the importance of operational BI is in the supply chain and logistics to help determine shipping locations, the right amount of inventory, and in cases of inventory shortages, determining your most profitable customers so they will receive their orders.

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

One capability that hasn’t quite caught on yet because the price tag is still a little high is radio frequency identifiers (RFID). RFID can provide a tremendous amount of BI information about everything you tag. It’s not just the traditional information about inventory anymore. There’s so much that we now use these tags for. Even today, for example, the toll road E-ZPass is an RFID, which provides an awful lot of information. There are obvious privacy concerns, but you can learn a lot based on that RFID. In the future, we’re going to see RFID as a disruptive technology, one that will force us to rethink our architectures and how we use that information and the technologies that support it.

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

I’m a firm believer in competency centers. Whether they are data integration or information delivery competency centers or a combination of both, they are the key to a cohesive and sustainable environment.

When we build business intelligence environments to learn more about our data – who’s using it, when they’re using it, what it means, how the company defines it and so forth – that intellectual capital is often spread throughout the enterprise, making it hard for a single team to know everything about the data. Competency centers help you maintain your intellectual capital.

Competency centers also focus the enterprise on BI efforts, providing one centralized place to get data integration. These centers help rationalize technology and provide vendors a single point of contact. That’s probably the best thing of all. The vendors know whom to contact, and the company doesn’t have vendors coming in at all different levels, talking with different people or selling different solutions throughout the organization.

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

Consolidation or mergers and acquisition of commoditized solutions will likely continue unabated for the next two years. Small niche players will continue creating interesting and useful solutions, but larger companies will provide one-stop shopping. These large software companies will continue to expand their technology suites by either buying them or building them. But simply buying a technology doesn’t mean it’s integrated. Companies that have been on buying sprees must focus on integrating new technologies within an architecture that makes sense to enable a seamless transition from one technology to the next.

We are also starting to see more companies offering BI software as a service, which opens the world of BI to smaller companies. This model appeals to the small to midsized companies that will get some, but not all, of the benefits that their bigger brothers have gotten by building their own business intelligence environments.

Bio: A thought leader, visionary and practitioner in the rapidly growing fields of business intelligence and customer-focused strategy, Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert on analytical CRM, business intelligence and the infrastructure to support these initiatives.