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August 7, 2002

The State of BI for the Masses

Immature support for evolving Web environments is the leading technology barrier to business intelligence.

by Philip Russom

The strongest trend in business intelligence (BI) today is still "BI for the masses," which has been underway since 1996. This movement is slowly but steadily bringing reporting and analysis capabilities to great numbers of end-users with a broader range of job titles and deeper locations in the corporate org chart than ever before.

Corporations hoping to succeed with this trend need a number of improvements in the BI platforms they implement for reporting and analysis. The improvements all involve Web technologies and standards, because these are required to present a BI user interface (UI) in a browser and to reach great numbers of diverse end-users who are geographically dispersed, both across an enterprise and beyond it.

First, report creation and consumption must be so easy that almost any business user can do it. The priority for the vendor should be to make the browser thin-client version of the report writer/viewer as intuitive as possible for the masses, while the Windows thick-client can be as complex as its power-analyst users need.
Second, BI platforms must securely deliver reports and other BI content over a long list of Web media, including intranets, extranets, portals, email, and eventually Web services. Many years from now, a few corporations may need reports delivered in wireless media.
Third, reports must be served up as simple HTML documents — possibly DHTML, if users have recent browser versions. Note that the masses seldom have the patience or network bandwidth for downloading applets, and IT can't necessarily mandate the users' browser brand and version inside a corporation, much less outside it.

Many BI vendors have made considerable progress in this area over the last several years, but all are still scrambling to beef up support of Web technologies and standards in their servers and browser-based UIs. But the vendors are ahead of most user organizations, which are likewise struggling to sort out the masses' requirements, where there are many user types who need a dizzying array of report types. We all have a long way to go — in terms of both technology support and best practices — before BI attains its destiny of serving the masses with intuitive browser-based UIs delivered over various Web media.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.PhilipRussom.com] is a Research Director at Giga Information Group where he provides advice to user organizations about data warehousing, business intelligence, and database management.