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Future of Business Intelligence Is Coming From Outside the BI Market

My keynote for the Orlando conference was all about the future. Instead of trying to predict exactly what we would be doing in five years' time, I talked about why it's hard to know that, why the people who do it (us industry analysts) are so often wrong, what we can look at to guess the shape of the future in our market, and some examples of smart people doing work that's already in the next generation of data warehousing.

The slides are posted below. I'll have a transcript posted once I have it cleaned up for public consumption.

The future of business intelligence is most likely going to come from (or be heavily influenced by) consumer web sites, consumer electronics and games. I'm not seeing a lot of real innovation in this market from the major players. They seem to still be adjusting to the architecture change from client-server to basic web 1.0.

At least I know some of my assumptions about the future are right. Cindi Howson mentioned that most customers are still running desktop versions of BI software, so the BI vendors are still having to pay too much attention to the past. While sharing a taxi with Claudia Imhoff I checked my thoughts about the younger generation against her experiences with her daughter. Surprisingly, I got a few things right. She also had some great observations about what people need versus what they want and what IT gives them. See her blog for of her thoughts.

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Labels: BI, business intelligence, data federation, data warehouse, future, information management, web2.0

Posted by Mark Friday, November 02, 2007 5:18:00 PM | permalink |

Comments:

Don't disagree with your basic premise but I have to wonder if BI under any guise is the answer. I look at my 19 year old and he simply won't do the kinds of jobs that people today do. Giving him more flexible tools to access data won't change that - the job needs to be automated to a level where he is willing to do the value-add tasks (then he needs the better tools you discuss). If the run of the mill transactions still require him to rubber stamp them he will run screaming from the workforce!

Decision automation and management to eliminate the need for human intervention in most transactions is required. The next generation of workers assumes that basic things "just happen" so corporations need to think that way too.

JT

James Taylor
The Smart (Enough) Systems blog
My ebizQ blog
Author of Smart (Enough) Systems

# posted by  James Taylor : 8:50 AM

 

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