Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?
I saw a post with the title “Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?” on Colin White’s blog and my first reaction was one of shock. On reading it, however, I see that Colin is taking aim not at BI in general but at the use of the phrase – a narrower and easier target!
I do think that the phrase has problems but not so much that it has outlived its usefulness, as that the usage of the term has been corrupted by software vendors. For instance, analyst firms often try to differentiate between Business Intelligence as a market and the software stack currently labeled as BI software. This is a real problem as it leads to confusion – the BI market includes data mining, for instance, where many BI products do not. The more precise terms like “reporting”, “OLAP”, “data mining” and “executable analytic models” are less prone to create confusion but even these have complications. I don’t know that there is a solution to this beyond a general “caveat emptor” (buyer beware). In this narrow sense, BI may have outlived its usefulness as a label.
The broader question, whether what is generally referred to as BI in a software product sense has outlived its usefulness, is both more interesting and more confusing. Any reader of my blog posts or of our book will know that some (many) of BI’s promises require technology and approaches well beyond the current BI software stack. In the end, Business Intelligence products are not enough to deliver the intelligent business that people want and need. BI (as traditionally defined) is still useful, it’s just not enough – necessary, perhaps, but not sufficient.
Tags:BI, BI, colin white, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions
The term BI has been causing confusion for quite a while: I tend to label the entire reporting/analytics/dashboard genre as BI, although others insist that BI is just the historical reporting part. Two years ago, I blogged about your comments from a Gartner BI conference (http://www.column2.com/2006/03/james-taylor-reporting-from-gartner-bi/), and pointed out the problem of constantly trying to rename the space, calling it all BI 2.0.
Hold on a second. I’m one of those who used the term BI 2.0, but I was pretty clear, i think, that I meant that it needed to follow Web 2.0. I’ve written a slew of articles about this. Here are a few:
http://intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197002610
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=185300410
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/toc/?day=01&month=10&year=2005
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=54200331
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/030901/614feat1_1.jhtml?_requestid=61279
I’ve seen the exact opposite use of the term BI than Sandy noted. The data warehouse crowd quickly remaned everything data warehousing to BI. This would include Colin White, who conveniently changed his name from DBAssociates to BI-research, even though the prepopnderance of his work these days is architecture. The same can be said for B-Eye Network, whose marquee players are still largely data and database oriented.
Even TDWI now identifies itself as the “…premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing.”
So BI is a pretty murky term. Unfortunately the 2.0 designation has been used to death, so we’re not going there anymore, but it is clear that BI, however you define it, is in an unstable position at the moment, caught between its own legacy and the need for rapid innovation.