Future of Business Intelligence
At the keynote presentation of the Microsoft BI Conference 2008 this morning vendor sponsors including Accenture, Dell, HP, Hitachi, and ProfitBase discussed the future of Business Intelligence. Several interesting ideas were raised about what BI might look like in 2010, including:
- BI solutions will be built and managed by business users, not IT, as demands grow for new information, faster
- Data Architects as we know them today will evolve into Information Architects, professionals who deeply understand the information lifecycle of the organization, from "birth to archival"
- BI becomes core to the business, like ERP and email today, becoming embedded in everyday processes, decisions, and actions
- BI solutions include exabytes of data, and the infrastructure to support the storage and retrieval of this data grows exponentially - the servers and systems to handle these volumes grow through virtualization and other intelligent architectures
I believe two other trends we will see over the next 10 years include:
- Focus on better, faster, and more efficient data visualization options for business users. Pie charts and gauges are not going to cut it. We need advanced visualization tools that will let us quickly sift through the mounds of data piling up in our systems.
- Expanding BI solutions to external users - customers, vendors, partners - integrating data from their systems and sharing information back to improve the overall ecosystem of the business
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