The Evolution of Business Intelligence

Thursday, October 29, 2009, ITWorld, Article by Sid Probstein

According to Gartner, by 2011, IT will allocate 75% of information management resources to integrate and analyze a blend of traditionally structured and diverse data types, whereas today 75% of resources are focused only on structured data. The next generation of information access solutions will reach out to the entire enterprise, bring together all of the information and make it universally accessible.

The Status Quo
Today's mainstay Business Intelligence (BI) tools are extremely good at tracking raw transactional numbers like sales figures and profit margins. What they fail to adequately address are the root causes, or drivers, of trends in those numbers. Moreover, they are typically able to tell what happened - but not explain why (unless it is evident in some other numeric data), let alone alert the business as a change emerges. Savvy business executives will gain advantage by moving beyond simply knowing what happened to preemptively understanding the forces acting on their business. What is causing a delay of payment from our largest customer? Why are sales in the southwest region down? How is user sentiment impacting our newest product?

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