Six trends in business intelligence
Trend 3: Rule by exception and collaboration
It's no secret that companies are trying to do more work with less people in less time than ever before. One way to deal with this is to "manage by exception."
Once the key performance indicators for a business process have been defined (for instance, quarterly sales in North America), it's a relatively easy job to monitor those indicators and compare them to historical results. If a predefined threshold in variance is reached, the alarm is sounded and notifications are sent. Opportunities abound in helping businesses define just exactly what those indicators are. And that is where domain expertise in a particular industry or vertical market comes into play.
"You can't prepackage domain experience," claims Anne Milley, manager of analytical strategy at SAS Institute. She maintains that partnering is the only way to help businesses ask the right questions using the right tools.
"Most people manage to five metrics or so," says Ted Stavropoulos, president of FRx Software. "People have their jobs; they don't have time to learn a new tool. Tools are generic and don't deliver any semantic knowledge about the data itself. It's then up to the user to figure out what's important--and what to use."
Brinkman sees activity monitoring, exception-based reporting and notification of events all on the upswing.
Meanwhile, traditional BI is evolving. Reporting may be the big event today, but tomorrow will be a different ball game. Think collaborative-processes predictive capabilities, such as a monitoring interface (for fax, e-mail and pager alerting) and a planning interface (for collaborative work, such as budgeting and forecasting).
Another key trend is that of collaboration. Oracle's Mirani sees BI becoming more collaborative in nature, with some work-flow mechanisms becoming essential as cross-departmental teams work on a particular task.
What it all means
Develop domain experience in a particular area or partner with someone who has the requisite experience. Learn how to create key performance indicators and make yours the best in the industry. Understand what work-flow tools can--and cannot--do.
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