Intelligent Enterprise

Web 2.0 technologies are going to change BI, possibly undercutting demand for conventional BI software. People wonder why I keep saying this. Here's a great example: real estate search.

Not that long ago, you would look at listings in your price range and try to work out where they were and whether they were in nice neighborhoods. More likely, a real estate agent would do this for you. Their value was almost entirely access to information and knowing how to get at it via the multi-list service.

Then online maps with satellite images made the job easier. You could see where the homes were and even search out other things on the map. It isn't hard to drop home listings meeting your criteria onto a map. Web sites popped up that do that. Today it's trivial to build a mashup that scrapes real estate search results and drops them onto a map.

Online real estate search gets really interesting when you start mixing in related data. For example, the local and state taxes, the performance of schools in the area, crime statistics or sales trends over the past year. Just like the data warehouse, integrating more data makes the entire experience much richer and more valuable. There are a number of sites out there that do exactly this. As an example, shown below is a heatmap display from Trulia.com showing sales prices by zip code in my county.

The combination of feeds, scraping tools, Web-service APIs and improved user interface technology let you do this type of display relatively easily. As we move from raw programming to development tools, we'll see an explosion in both data available and ways to display it.

The user interface side of Web 2.0 technology is the area that's going to affect BI vendors. You can get almost any display component you see in a dashboard or reporting tool as an embeddable widget. This means you can add data display capabilities to any Web page or application, removing the need for a BI front-end.

The BI vendors talk lot about operational BI and embedded reporting. The question is, why would you spend all that money for a BI tool to do this? The norm for application user interfaces is the Web, so why not use Web technology to display the data? The logical approach is to access the data infrastructure and provide the required display components using native tools. It's cheaper, faster and more flexible.

The vendors will have to find ways to make their tools relevant as data and infrastructure providers, or move into Web display widgets and frameworks in order to stay relevant in the embedded/operational BI space.

Here are some example real estate search sites with embedded reporting and analytics. They look like modern analytic applications, except that they're consumer-focused rather than business user focused.

- Trulia
- Terabitz
- Zillow
- My Currency
- Trulia Hindsight

Mark Madsen is president of Third Nature, a consulting and research firm focused on business intelligence, data integration and data management. He is a principal author of Clickstream Data Warehousing and speaks about data warehousing and emerging technology. Write him at mmadsen0@yahoo.com.

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