April 3, 2007
Business intelligence — technology and vendor strategy
The most recent Monash Letter – exclusively for Monash Advantage members — spells out some ideas on BI technology and vendor strategy. Specifically, it argues that there are at least four major ways to think about BI and other decision support technologies, namely as:
- A specialized application development technology. That’s what BI is, after all. Selling app dev runtimes isn’t a bad business. Selling analytic apps hasn’t gone so well, however.
- An infrastructure upgrade. That’s what the BI vendors have been pushing for some years, as they try to win enterprise vendor-consolidation decisions. To a first approximation, it’s been a good move for them, but it also has helped defocus them from other things they need to be doing.
- A transparent window on information. As Google, Bloomberg, and Lexis/Westlaw all demonstrate, users want access to “all” the possible information. BI vendors and management theorists alike have erred hugely in crippling enterprise dashboards via dogmas such as “balanced scorecards” and “seven plus-or-minus two.”
- A communication and collaboration tool. Communication/collaboration is as big a benefit of reporting as the numbers themselves are. I learned this in the 1980s, and it’s never changed. But BI vendors have whiffed repeatedly at enhancing this benefit.
The Letter then goes on to suggest two areas of technical need and opportunity in BI, which may be summarized as:
- “Play very nicely with portals.”
- “Do a much better job of managing personal metrics customization.”
Good launching points for my other research on these subjects are this recent post on analytic technology marketing strategies and two high-concept white papers available here.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Usability and UI
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