Analytic Architectures - Approaches to Supporting Analytics Users and Workloads

Authored by Wayne Eckerson, BeyeNetwork

Where is my robot? It's 2011, isn't it? Forget the flying car, but wasn't I supposed to have a robot by now? – Neil Raden, BI/Data Warehousing author and analyst, on Twitter.

Clearly, many past predictions for the future remain firmly entrenched in the realm of science fiction.  Wayne Eckerson, renowned BI authority, offers up some much more useful predictions on what highly effective BI will look like over the next ten years, as well as an action plan to get there in a major new BeyeNETWORK report – Analytic Architectures: Approaches to Supporting Analytics Users and Workloads.

Over the next ten years, writes Eckerson, organizations must embrace four types of intelligence to maximize the business value of enterprise data:  business intelligence (BI), which he defines as serving the specific needs of casual users; analytic intelligence for power users (business analysts); continuous intelligence for automatic data monitoring and analysis;  and content intelligence, technology enabling the ability to additionally integrate unstructured data such as documents, web pages, email messages and more as a source for BI.

Of these four intelligence domains, Eckerson says content intelligence is perhaps the most important of all, noting that for years BI has all but ignored unstructured information, which contains vital business insights not available within structured data. He goes on to state that this problem is solved through unified information access (UIA) technology, fully integrating unstructured and structured data.

Not long ago, this unprecedented level of business insight was the BI technology equivalent of robots and flying cars, but no more:  for UIA, the future is now.