2010 set to be the year of Business Intelligence
by Jeff Vahrenwald, Kraft Enterprise SystemsWith the worst of the economic crisis apparently behind us, many companies will be moving into 2010 looking for the best strategic investments to position themselves for growth. Much of that spending will be focused on IT upgrades, but industry analysts predict that a lot of the buzz in 2010 will be focused specifically the area of Business Intelligence (BI).
"When the going gets tough, proponents like to claim, it’s a safe bet to double down on business intelligence," says Stephen Swoyer, a technology writer based in Athens, GA. "Although it won’t completely inoculate you against the effects of adverse business conditions," Swoyer adds, "it’s shaping up to be a fascinating time to be in the business intelligence sector."
Generally speaking, BI refers to technology solutions that provide businesses with key information—often in the form of dashboards—that allows businesses to make informed decisions. Companies such as Amazon.com, AT&T, the US Army, and Ford Motor Company were early adopters of BI technology but new providers of BI software have made robust business intelligence available to the mid-market.
Two areas of Business Intelligence to watch in 2010:
Real-time BI
2009 was full of talk about real-time technology&either in real-time web or applications or in the increasing amounts of streaming data available. In 2010, the rise of real-time technology appears to be making its way into business intelligence.
According to Brian Gentile, CEO of open source BI provider Jaspersoft, streaming data will start taking the place of ad hoc queries in BI-based systems and new analytic data warehouses will be able to provide very fast access to trends and calculations that yield new meaning and lead to decisions being made throughout the business day with up-to-the-second intelligence.
"In 2010," says Gentile, "we’ll see some interesting use cases for real-time BI that will shine a light on just how this technology can be harnessed to solve business problems in novel ways. For example, multiplayer game companies could track online gaming behavior so that their games can adjust in real time to the most popular activities in the environment and increase players and visitors in the process."
Collaborative BI
Collaborative BI involves the use of collaboration software to share and institutionalize information and the BI industry has been talking about Collaborative BI for several years now, but the technology did not exist for it to work the way analysts had predicted.
Today, the technology has caught up but also the rise of social media and a new focus on sharing and community participations make collaborative BI a reality. Concurrently, BI practitioners seem to be awakening to the fact that business problems are solved collaboratively.
"The fundamental Web-based technology is in place to allow collaboration across analysis, reports, and any variety of other enterprise information that will help users make decisions faster and better," says Gentile. "In 2010, expect to see collaborative BI extend the reach of data-driven strategic decisions throughout organizations resulting in an even greater return on corporate investment in BI."
Included among collaborative BI technology is what industry experts call "social CRM" which allows companies to track customer sentiment and feedback through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
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