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September 1, 2003

Stepping Up BI Expectations

A jumbled array of disjointed analytic, reporting, and alert tools exists in most enterprises, unconnected to a unifying enterprise BI architecture. The situation has to, and will, change.

by Neil Raden

Continued from Page 2

Single metadata repository. It must have a single metadata repository, with an open schema and complete documentation. In addition, and most important of all, it must treat the metadata schema from one version to the next the same as it would any other upwardly compatible component. Some vendors consider metadata a proprietary element of their software and take liberties with version upgrades. In a connected, agile environment, this behavior is unacceptable.

Integration consistent with metadata. All integration between modules must be consistent within the metadata, providing a sort of referential integrity for development and enhancement by all the stakeholders. This provision prevents deletion of components with dependencies and addition of components that conflict with existing ones. This consistency must extend across the entire spectrum of developer and administrator productivity tools.

Results Matter

The real importance of enterprise BI isn't its architectural integrity but rather its ability to assist people in getting their work done. A coherent architecture is a desirable trait to technologists, but knowledge workers aren't interested in it. The true test of a tool is whether it can perform the tasks users need. Queries per day, terabytes, metadata, APIs — these are all peripheral issues to knowledge workers. What's important to them is whether they save some time and derive intelligence in an environment that doesn't give them vertigo. These two requirements translate into:

A single (preferably Web-based) interface that is simple and consistent across all functions
The smarts and the horsepower to solve difficult problems, end-to-end.

In Table 1, I compare five different analyses. On the left, I describe how enterprise BI would work. On the right, I describe how you would derive the same or similar results from a sample of current BI offerings. You can see how the enterprise BI approach would benefit the enterprise.

Get Ready for the Next Wave

Organizations flocked to packaged enterprise solutions only to find that, as Doug Neal of CSC Research said, they had the flexibility of poured concrete: liquid at first, but rigid once they set. This realization brought on the era of enterprise application integration, a useful but imperfect solution. With the emergence of standards such as Business Process Markup Language, it will soon be possible for companies to not only design their business processes, but to change them in the middle of a business day. This sort of agility is only a few years away.

It's time for BI vendors to take a hard look at their technology and get ready for the next wave. It's going to be hard, because this is the segment that has done the least amount of innovating. Data warehousing has made tremendous progress in back-end processes, such as extract, transform, load and data quality; the database vendors have vastly improved their products in just the last few years; and the whole business of data warehousing has become a lot less risky and a lot more predictable.

Only the BI segment has stalled. The major players have barely changed at all in the last 10 years, a period in time when half the Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. Lucky for a few BI vendors, they started out on the right path to enterprise BI and are poised to grab a bigger piece of the market.

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If you're a licensee of BI software, be prepared to reevaluate your choices in the near future; although the visionaries have a small market share now, they won't for long.

Expect market shares to change dramatically. As business intelligence enters its second decade, there's a tremendous opportunity to up everyone's productivity. Eliminating shadow-IT, latency, data czars, and other bottlenecks will free analysis to flow into action. Those suppliers who can't resist mining their niche and staying in their comfort zone won't survive. Some nimble newcomers will compete with the handful of established vendors that are on the right track already. And we will all benefit.

Neil Raden [nraden@hiredbrains.com] is the founder of Hired Brains Inc., provider of research and analysis in business intelligence and offering consulting services for decision-support systems, data warehousing, and BI applications in North America and Europe. He is also a founding partner of the Business Intelligence Alliance (www.bialliance.com).