The State of Business Intelligence

David Stodder just did a great write up on The State of Business Intelligence in a feature story in Network Computing that gives a fairly complete vision of where the industry is heading, and more importantly, what organizations really need from the technology to gain business value.  The bottom line identified in this article is dead on - "Conventional data warehouses, disconnected BI and analysis tools need an overhaul. Actionable intelligence and speedier, automated decision-making are the objectives of next-generation BI."

These were the exact drivers behind IBM's dynamic warehousing strategy announced just two weeks ago.  As the Network Computing article (cleverly titled "Good BI Cruel World?") points out, "next-generation BI promises speedier, automated decision-making" and points out that most existing BI platforms are "mired in historical analysis across siloed back ends."  The key is that analytic capabilities must be injected directly into all of your different activities and business processes, and must be able to leverage ALL enterprise information across the organization, including all types of information (e.g. structured, unstructured and semi-structured).

I was talking to Mark Beyer, a Gartner analyst, about this at a recent Gartner BI Summit, and he gave us an interesting suggestion that we stop talking about our solution as a "warehouse" and start referring to it as an "Analytic Information Repository."  Given IBM's propensity to leverage acronyms, I'm not sure attempts to market AIR would go over so well, but this is in essence what we are trying to turn warehouses into - a platform that can be deployed to enable analytics on all relevant enterprise information.  Companies need technology that will enable all users across the enterprise to more easily access the information and generate the insights needed to make better decisions, faster.

I still haven't figured out what to really call this, although from initial feedback, such as Vincent McBurney's extremely entertaining post titled IBM puts the shizzel into the Data Warehouse, people seem to like Dynamic Warehousing and the new IBM Balanced Warehouse.  However, it's important to note that unlike one of the comments on that post, you can NOT achieve these types of benefits with standard databases and reporting tools.  Without dedicated warehousing capabilities, such as shared nothing parallelism and workload management, you will not be able to achieve this vision.  And even some of the new "appliance" solutions to hit the market, while providing affordable, optimized query speeds, will not be able to support the broader analytics requirements.  As highlighted by David Stodder, "appliances are customized for a specific purpose; they are not meant for mixed workloads, such as OLTP plus complex data querying, or even analytical workloads that require specific tuning to meet unusual objectives."

The next generation of BI will be what finally delivers the long promised benefits of BI to the masses.  And Dynamic Warehousing will be the AIR that enables companies to finally start realizing significant business value from their investements.

Comments

[Vincent McBurney]

Thanks for your supportive comments about my blog post. It is good to know that if I get to IoD 2007 later this year I wont have to face an irate warehousing team! I have one question about the use terms such as appliance, bundle, package or pseudo appliance (TDWI): what exactly would you called the Balanced Warehouse?