Six trends in business intelligence
Trend 6: Why more is less
A great deal of work has been done to integrate more functionality into tools and applications. One argument for that thrust is usability. The number of different tools necessary to "get the answer" can be mind-numbing.
Oracle's Merani claims, "Where you once needed a dozen tools to perform the analysis, now you need just two--the database and the application server."
While Oracle has been waging a war against complexity for some time, it can be a compelling argument when a line of business managers "want ROI now, not two years from now," according to Merani.
But an all-in-one tool has its drawbacks, too. Issues of feature depth and breadth come into play here, not to mention the fact that by going with a single vendor, you're effectively at its mercy. While the job becomes simpler due to improved integration, there's always going to be disparate data from other sources that will need to be included in the analysis.
There's also the issue of the extensibility of applications with embedded analytic capabilities built-in. Is it useful if it doesn't grow with you? SAS' Milley asks, "What's the ROI on a nonextensible system?"
As ERP, CRM and database vendors integrate more capability into the products, the role of the systems integrator may change as there is less work necessary to deliver the required functionality.
"In the future, the system integrator will need to address business issues in the form of domain expertise. A lot of the traditional systems integration tasks are going away," according to Merani.
What it all means
Determine how to augment these packages with your own best-practices assembly of analytics tools and business acumen. No matter where in the cycle you choose to play--whether it's identifying the processes that need measurement, determining metrics, cleansing the data, architecting the data warehouse, using domain expertise to place the right analytics tools which ask the right questions in the hands of the right people, or doing the back-end integration that turns the analytic results into action, there are opportunities at every turn.
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