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19/01/2010 BI Opportunities Outpace Organizatio… BI Opportunities Outpace Organizations’ Ability to Use It Information Management Special Reports, November 27, 2007 Boris Evelson Business intelligence (BI) sits at the top of the IT priority list for many enterprises. Enterprises that haven’t paid enough attention now see a need to act, and those that have kept up with BI want to consolidate their siloed implementations. The promises of BI attract any organization, but how do you get started? Enterprises face multidimensional choices, and they cannot start with vendor selection. Tasks such as data governance, matching requirements with logical architectures and picking an experienced architect and implementer should be at the top of the list. ADVERTISEMENT Business processes have become automated enough for business users to start thinking ambitiously. The opportunity for BI innovation and differentiation appears at every turn constantly proven by many emerging companies popping up left and right. To protect your BI investment, we believe you should watch and consider the following major market trends: Convergence of structured and unstructured content analyses. Modern analytics blends unstructured data with traditional structured data to give users the ability to detect patterns and run what-if scenarios. Consider retail customer segmentation: The old way meant combining customer sales with customer and store demographics. Today retailers on the cutting edge realize that adding comments and complaints from email and call centers will significantly enhance their segmentation analysis. You could always pore through text manually and code it along criteria you developed, though few ever do because of the time and effort it requires. BI calls for these connections to be automated, so analysts can focus on turning insight into action, instead of hunting through multiple mail systems, phone systems and enterprise applications.1 Combining data with process awareness. BI and business process management (BPM) have always addressed a common need separately, bringing people and information into alignment. The operational improvement cycle - learn, design, inform, act and repeat focuses on increasing efficiency. But organizations with ambitious strategic goals need to be more than efficient - they need to be effective. BPM might make processing a customer credit application less expensive, but analytics can use sophisticated customer segmentation to increase cross-sell and up-sell ratios in real time during a customer interaction - when it counts. Expect solutions to combine data and process dashboards, event-based actions http://www.information-management… 1/3 19/01/2010 BI Opportunities Outpace Organizatio… triggered by data conditions that initiate a business process, and traditional BI layers (reports, dashboards and analytics) responding seamlessly to business processes across multiple systems.2 Entry of relational database alternatives. The relational database management system (RDBMS) was originally designed to execute small transactions, not to examine large volumes of data with BI queries. Over the years the technology has caught up, but RDBMSes still have to shoehorn two personalities into one body. Alternate DBMS models will increasingly enable BI for two big reasons: 1) removing the bias between structured and unstructured data, and 2) OLAP query processing. Explosion of dimensions to support future BI analysis. Traditional cross-tabular reporting quickly becomes useless after more than a few dozen dimensions, no matter how sophisticated the “slicing and dicing” interfaces are. One possible approach is so-called “guided analytics,” where users can rapidly mix and match dimensions interactively. Another is visualizing patterns graphically, giving users a big-picture view of extremely large data matrices for identifying trends. Figure 1: How to Choose a Vendor Category Define the Architecture for All of the Layers of the BI Stack Do not overlook the rest of the necessary BI components, which may or may not necessarily be considered part of a BI strategy. This includes metadata, data integration, data quality, data modeling, analytics, centralized metrics management, presentation (reports and dashboards), portals, collaboration, knowledge management and master data management.3 Many of these components, while not necessarily BI driven, or even BI related, help determine the success of BI implementations. References: 1. IW strategy and architecture plan must break down the wall between structured data and http://www.information-management… 2/3 19/01/2010 BI Opportunities Outpace Organizatio… unstructured content to ensure delivery of all relevant information. See the June 20, 2007, “Information Should Be Front And Center In Information Workplace Strategies” report. Confirming the trend, Business Objects announced its intent to acquire Inxight Software in May. See the May 31, 2007, “Business Objects Buys Into Unstructured Information With Inxight Software” report. 2. Most visionary business process management (BPM) vendors now find that they’ve been defining their own market too narrowly. Not only do enterprises need to optimize their business processes, they also want to optimize their business results. As TIBCO recently demonstrated by buying Spotfire, the next strategic move for organizations seeking business optimization will be to combine BI and BPM for visualizing process metrics and business results together, and even more importantly, to turn transactions into decisions. See the September 19, 2007, “From BPM To Business Optimization” report. 3. The “layers” of the BI stack include many other technologies such as metadata; extract, transform, and load (ETL); data quality and master data management. See the July 11, 2006, “Getting Your Arms Around Metadata” report; see the May 2, 2007, “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise ETL, Q2 2007” report; see the January 17, 2006, “The Forrester Wave: Information Quality Software, Q1 2006” report; and see the November 10, 2006, “Introducing Master Data Management” report. Boris Evelson is a princiapl analytst with Forrester Research specializing in business intelligence. Evelson is one of the driving forces behind Forrester's offerings for information and knowledge management professionals. His current research focuses on some of the latest trends in BI, such as convergence of multiple, formerly separate disciplines of structured and unstructured data, process and data intelligence, real-time BI and many others into overall enterprise effectiveness and optimization. û For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: Business Intelligence (BI) ©2010 Information Management and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved. SourceMedia is an Investcorp company. Use, duplication, or sale of this service, or data contained herein, is strictly prohibited. http://www.information-management… 3/3