BI & Analysis: Better Results with Collaboration, Reliable Data

By Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt) May 3, 2011

In The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics: True Intelligence for Business, I initiated an analysis of the current state of “business intelligence" — the kind of intelligence that truly benefits enterprises derives from classic definitions of the word: Learning, understanding and applying knowledge and experience to new situations to make better decisions. Until recently, BI has mostly derived from practices and technology that address structured data and business processes inside the firewall. BI will now have to include unstructured or content sources in analytics, to add in missing subtleties, context and insight that cannot be pulled from structured data sources.

Now let's further analyze new directions for business intelligence and analytics.

New World Focus on BI, Predictive Analytics

Some of the significant changes to analytics solutions relate to how final artifacts are “formatted." There has been a growing transition from traditional report formats to interactive visualization tools, and to collaborative processes that enhance the final artifacts. More companies want BI to help with current and future needs and goals, rather than measuring the past. And these companies should be inviting more individuals (via collaboration) to help refine the accuracy and contributions of analytics outputs. Newer on-demand BI/analytics solutions are providing “right now” intelligence, though still these are still works-in-progress, for the most part.

A number of articles lately have made the point that BI initiatives have not been successful for many customers, while making another important point: "Failure” actually is part of the BI refinement cycle. But for costly enterprise-style BI solutions, “failure” can be quite expensive. Gerry Brown of Bloor comments:

However, there is little doubt that the number of BI users overall is increasing. With low-cost operators such as QlikTech, Tableau, LogiXML, Pentaho and Jaspersoft, you get an awful lot of BI software for $25,000. Conversely, most enterprise BI vendors don't traditionally get out of bed for deals of less than $50,000. Low cost (or 'free') BI software encourages trial and experimentation with little risk, and this is what most enterprises prefer. After all, BI project 'failures' are common."

Referring again to the graphic for “BI Has Hit the Wall”, Stephen Few sees that “the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall” — while the future of BI will come from more non-traditional BI solutions:

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions — those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall — have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Vendors like Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, Panopticon, Advisor Solutions and SAS tend to either be spinoffs of university research or companies that have ventured into the BI marketplace from a long history of work in statistics.

In an interesting and thought-provoking Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI platforms, the analysts see significant changes in the solutions sought by enterprises:

…there is significant, if not euphoric, satisfaction with, and accelerated interest in, pure-play BI platforms. This is particularly true for smaller, innovative vendors filling needs left unmet by the larger vendors. To understand this paradox, it is necessary to consider a number of factors that are driving the BI platform buying decision today.

Other vendors to watch for new ways to perform and use BI / analytics include Lyzasoft, Predixion Software and GoodData. Lyzasoft and Predixion recently became partners for cloud-to-cloud analytics-as-a-service. GoodData provides BI PaaS to help speed solution deployments.