However, it seems to me that the current economic climate is driving two opposing trends for the BI world. One that business agility and efficiency needs to improve – in turn driving the need for the best BI tools the market can offer. The second is BI vendor consolidation in a recession. This trend of consolidation will lead to less choice for the consumer or end user, meaning mega vendors (and we all know who they are) dominating the industry – owning aged software architectures and lacking innovation.

For any technology to continue to grow and deliver the benefits that customers want, we all know that innovation is required – it’s not just a nice word. Given that many IT users today were born in the Internet age – expectations of how systems work are different. Users expect to be able to understand and use software immediately; applications need to work to the new world order – which is driven by web principles. Google’s approach to the search market (and every other market since) is a perfect example.

Software that isn’t user-centric will simply not survive and this is something the BI market must sit up and take note of.

Going out on a limb, here are five predictions of what the BI world will look like in the future:

5 predictions

• BI systems based on queries won’t exist in 10 years time
• BI Systems which take months and years to implement, get up and running and deliver value – will die – unacceptable to the Internet Generation
• The days of the Business Analyst or Government Quangos ruling the roost are over – democratisation of BI will enable everyone to have access to information and make decisions
• Business Units or departments will become more “loosely coupled” as they are able to be more autonomous over their parts of the business and less reliant on corporate BI as a whole.
• Business will become more agile and five year business plans relegated to the waste bin

I’d like to see what on what they think.

Let me explain what I mean – today’s BI solutions have been totally designed around what technology can do – using highly complex languages requiring qualified analysts to query and understand “classes” and “hierarchies” and the organisation of their data to use their BI systems.

This approach has driven the cost of BI upwards for the enterprise – needing “qualified” staff to use the systems to run reports, and specialised IT support to do just that – support, implement and maintain these systems.
The thing which makes me laugh most about BI 2.0 is that the name denotes something user – friendly – just as web 2.0 is all about social media, and “Google” like applications which anyone can use – this is exactly the opposite of the “mega vendors” approach. They are unfortunately in a straight-jacket – tied into what will become “legacy” software and code which doesn’t embrace the openness or democratisation of the “2.0” principles.

So what do I see as the next generation of BI? Yes it will be embracing the principles of 2.0 and openness (In that sense, I probably don’t see anything differently from others). The next generation will focus more on real-time and something everyone can use – and that is the crux of the matter. With current technology not everyone can use BI apps, because the technology is “elitist” and continuing to use the same query language will not lead to the democratisation of BI in the style of web 2.0 principles.

The problem with the technology as I alluded to earlier is that it is not designed from the USER’s viewpoint. The interface is complicated, in many cases you need to understand SQL query language, you need to understand how your database is built to understand which data to search through, you need to have the patience to run reports and accept that maybe you will be waiting hours, days, months or even years (yes that’s right, years!). You might have to resign yourself to actually that “opportunity” because you can’t act on up-to-date information – which you may or may not have – or can even get access to.
To my mind this is why technology is the problem and why we as an industry should be embracing “user-centric” BI. In many ways it is the same as BI 2.0 except that it will be 2.0. And this is what I mean by this.
User-centric BI will use technology designed from the users point of view. Today’s Internet generation is savvy and expect to be able to understand and use technology in minutes – Google-like browsers and cognitive interfaces allow quick and easy access to information and tools.

In the world today, as we’ve come to expect, information will be delivered in real-time allowing the enterprise to react and act immediately – to be more in touch with the customer or trends in the external business environment.
None of this can be delivered by an industry which wants to merely upgrade to BI 2.0 – it needs to innovate to user-centric BI. And whilst technology is the heart of the problem - the user is the answer to the matter.

In the last year the business intelligence market has consolidated. Has this led to less choice? Industry consolidation reflects the increasing importance that the major software suppliers put on the use of BI tools to extract value from company data.

Gartner analysis says that the BI market has defied the recession by growing 22% yoy from 2007-2008 showing that businesses know that they need BI tools. The problem is that the mega vendors are capturing this growth through acquisitions rather than through delivering what customers really want in their BI tools.

Consolidation means that there is no market driver for innovation, vendors can capture more customers by buying them, they secure revenues through lengthy contracts and no requirement for competitive pricing – making life difficult for existing customers who are now faced with a vast range of altered or upgrades based on mixed portfolios of the merged companies.

Reading James Governors http://tinyurl.com/ncn3yn recent post on IBMs acquisition of SPSS – I agree with the direction it may take IBM in – and that if they know what they are doing! – it could be good for the industry but, I can’t help but revert to my opinion that continual consolidation is just a mere land grab for more market share and customers – a cheats way of growing.

The BI/Data warehousing industry needs a complete shake up rather than further acquisitions, simple BI solutions based on google like principles which allow anyone to understand information is the way forward.