Monthly Archives: June 2011

Cheap Memory and Multi Core.  With the cost of memory at it’s lowest for years and the new developments in multi-core processors hitting the market place the way we think about building and implementing a Business Intelligence solution has changed.  The ability to run data warehouses in memory and the processing power available will allow the way data is handled not just in the business area but also in the corporate semantic layer to change.  The mega vendors will not lose their position within the corporate area because of the massive amounts of funds already invested in the solution but they must embrace the challenge of providing access to the corporate layer at the same speed that other areas of information can be accessed.  You cannot have a user accessing sales or marketing data utilizing a ‘Google’ type search system from the internet or departmental sources with all its inherent speed only to have to wait for IT to deliver matching governed product data which has been sanitized two weeks later – this is of no use and in certain businesses would be pointless.  This seismic shift in the way that information can and will be delivered in the future will ensure that businesses can gain insight in near real time into the reasons for their failure or success in the market – enabling decision change to be made quickly will ensure that companies can be more profitable in these uncertain economic times.

I am very excited with all things BI at the moment, a lot of the mega vendors are tearing around in development trying to catch up with the independent vendors who have realized that the future of Business Intelligence is based upon the idea that the end users who need the insight into their businesses are the people who really need to control what, how and when BI is delivered.  These vendors are having a major impact on the BI Space – they are innovative, progressive and determined to succeed in an area which for the last ten years has seen a 90% failure rate.

The following are my picks for the requirements for future systems – at all levels of the enterprise -which will be needed to succeed in the BI space of the future:

• In Memory Analytics that the user controls in real time
• Simplicity of Data Search, Detection and Integration
• Ability to connect to any and all data sources including the Corporate BI semantic layer
• Speed, Speed and more Speed
• Ease of use
• Collaboration
• Continuity and governance of corporate BI and business statistical data

More to follow:

Until very recently I have spent most of my consulting career designing and constructing tactical Business Intelligence (BI) tools for Business Users sometimes with the co-operation of the IT Department and sometimes in direct competition to them.  Because of this I have been cautious when investigating the new trend of Self Service BI which claims to provide a complete solution to the business user by providing advance visualization, data discovery and integration and visual analytics.

Sat at home one evening recently I was pondering over the problems that face both the IT Department and the Business User when searching for the truth amongst the myriad sources of information prevalent within most organizations.  In the office a request to search for information requires the business user to submit a requirement to the IT department to supply a snap shot of data the user then has to wait until this request is fulfilled before they can take the data supplied, extract the exact figures they want and then marry this data to department data to actually get to the insight that they are looking for.  Compare this with the near instantaneous results of a search request to any one of the major search suppliers on the web whilst on the internet and you can completely understand the user’s frustration.

The new swath of vendors offering to supply the answer to this problem have realized that the business users have become disappointed by the inflexibility over the last ten years of Corporate BI implementations to provide insight into their corporate data.  These new “Self Service” tools being currently offered seem to be the solution to this problem in that they combine interactive visual analytics with data integration and near instant results for even complex BI cases.  This means that the new vendors are ensuring that their sales effort is placed firmly with the Business Community in most cases to the detriment of the IT Community.

The major concern that I have with regards to these tools is governance of data or to put it another way “One Version of the Truth”.  The need for Business Intelligence Right Now (BIRN) to support critical business decisions based on insight into multiple data sources is well understood by the Business  however as they cannot verify the data once it has left the rarified air of the BI Semantic Layer they cannot guarantee it is the one version of the truth.  This is also a major problem with most if not all of the current tools on the market supplied by various vendors is that they also cannot guarantee that they have governed data as most either store the data locally or only use a snapshot.

This problem has been identified by Quest Software who currently has in development a number of tools which will aid collaboration between not just IT and the business but also between business departments utilizing the “One Version of the Truth” as the core of their systems.   Self-Service BI is not a myth, but with too many supposed “self-service” solutions are being designed (knowingly or not) for a the more technical user who sometimes identify themselves as “Data Analysts” and have far too much complexity for the normal Business Analyst (BA).  The BA has no problem with a pivot table in excel and understanding the business relationships of the data but when faced with a requirement to understand SQL or Data Architecture struggles.  Taking this into consideration Quest has designed two separate tools one for the Technical user and one for the business user.  Both are easy to use, intuitive and have the ability to integrate and analyses data from many disparate sources and then provide visualization and basic dashboard reporting their critical difference however is that they supply a secure connection to the company’s BI infrastructure to provide the governed data required to make the insight provided correct.