Your Visions for Business Intelligence

Readers respond to online survey about the future of business intelligence

By Alison Bolen

At the end of 2006, 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. We published their responses in the first quarter 2007 issue of sascom and online. In those articles, we also invited you, our readers, to offer your perspectives on business intelligence. Here, we publish some of your responses.

What is your vision of how business intelligence will be used two to five years from now?
BI may well “govern” enterprise decision making. Those enterprises with a strong BI focus will be far more profitable and less costly than those that are inflexible and unfocused. 
     – Don Kellond, Project Manager, Centrelink, Australia

Real-time integration with key business functions. Varied information delivery capabilities. Ability to map the growing mobile market with instant access to BI information.
     – Senthil Mohan Kumar, Business Analyst/Architect, PGS Ventures, India

BI will be the venue where the ANSWERS appear. If the BI solution is effective and intuitive and simple in its delivery, then the business will take to it.
     – C. Noble, Senior Information Analyst, one of the top five financial corporations in Canada

What capabilities will be widely available in BI solutions of the future?
Predictive analysis will mature to merge with data mining and tell users – or alert users – of answers to questions they didn’t think to ask.
     – Karen Degner, Managing Principal, BPM Paradigms LLC, United States

BI solutions will include strong analytics and will focus on the interfaces between the corporation and all its stakeholders, as this is where improved value comes from. Therefore, a strong ability to allow inputs from external systems and search engines to updates BI will be important.
      – Gary Ferguson, BI thought leader, Harmony Re, South Africa

Real-time capabilities, allowing [organizations] to sift through vast amount of data in real time, delivering instant insights, leading to a perfect match of the customer experience with his/her expectations.
      – Dr. Jean-Marie R. Fiechter, Senior DWH Architect, CubeServ Group, Switzerland

Unstructured data capture, larger focus on nontraditional data sources and lighter user infrastructure.
     – Anil Pillai, CEO, rapidEffect Ltd., India

What should organizations be doing now to help lay the foundation for long-term BI strategies?
Develop in-house talent. Develop data warehouses to respond to future applications such as text mining. Develop strong relations with outside expertise and vendors.
     – Charles Patridge, Senior Data Engineer, Full Capture Solutions Inc., United States

Standardize on one or two platforms through competency centers or strategy offices that drive harmonization across global organizations.
     – Jackie Anthony, Commercial Executive, Atos Origin, Great Britain

Integrate data and manage the metadata. Deploy a sophisticated BI framework. Form a decision-flow process to make decisions more manageable.
      – Liu Qing, Consultant, Canada

Train leaders to delegate duties. Scrutinize the organization’s activities. Have a high level of fraud control. Have good management of employees, their performance evaluations and their pay. Regard the customer as the sole heart of the organization’s operations.
     – Nantanda Rose, Finance Analyst, Sir Apollo Kaggwa Schools, Uganda

Build the skills in-house on how to adequately identify the analytical needs. Cultivate deep knowledge of the core businesses, which serves as a basis for substantial analytical capability.
     – George Leburu, Stream Leader of Wires and Business Processes, Eskom Distribution, South Africa

Understand complexity and focus on getting data out of the warehouses and onto the desktop. DIY BI will engage leadership.
     – Mike Morrison, Director, Morison Associates Ltd., Scotland

How might the BI vendor landscape look in two to five years?
Vendors will be able to offer a wider range of solutions, primarily in the services space, especially the business process outsourcing space, which throws a different kind of challenge on information sharing and management.
     – Shrikant Govil, Assistant Vice President, ABN AMRO, India

For the smaller users, such as small- to medium-sized businesses, a complete suite alternative will be essential for getting started. Performance, scope and flexibility, and ease of use are mandatory.
     – Fred Mayer, Consultant, FedEx, United States

Bio: Alison Bolen is editor-in-chief of sascom magazine.