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Seven Trends That Will Change Business Intelligence As We Know It

Contents
Introduction Trend #1: Self Service BI Trend #2: BI Goes Mobile Trend #3: Collaborative and Social Features Trend #4: Business Intelligence in the Cloud Trend #5: Open Source Takes Over Trend #6: Big Data Trend #7: Real-time Insight Conclusion Learn More 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 11

Introduction
After years of relative stability, the world of business intelligence is now experiencing a sea change.
The old rules of thumb no longer apply, and companies cannot assume that yesterdays BI strategies continue to be viable. Consider these fundamental shifts: We manage differently. Instead of relying on instinct, todays businesses place more stock in number-crunching and objectively measuring performance. Users experience data differently. Most people have used web-based applications to manage and interact with their personal data for years. These consumer grade applications rely on an intuitive and highly interactive experience with near-instantaneous response. Great expectations. From MapQuest, Gmail and Facebook to more specialized solutions including those for blog traffic analysis and portfolio management, these tools have raised expectations for end users. If we want users to be engaged, our BI apps had better do the same. Information management technology is leaping ahead. Now its possible to derive genuine business insight from large quantities of data more quickly, for dramatically less cost and effort than ever before. The rules have changed. Collectively, these changes mean that many of the old BI technologies, architectures, and approaches no longer apply. Now, businesses want to make fact-based decisions, based on the analysis of data from a variety of data sources, in ways never before possible. Users want a compelling, effective experience. And the technologies to support both of these are quickly coming online. The old rules. Youve heard themyou may even have repeated them aloud: The average end-user isnt sophisticated enough to do their own analysis. Many important analysis approaches are simply not technically feasible. Real-time reporting and analysis arent feasible: they require exorbitant budgets and performance-killing access to transaction systems. Comprehensive BI is an expensive game, requiring pricey software and hardware. The new rules ... are being written now. The changes are significant. So lets take a look at seven trends that will force us all to re-thinkand re-tool.

Trend 1 Self-Service BI
Reporting and analytics user expectations have changed, More and more end users create and modify their own output and Dashboards and mashboards abound
In the past decade, most of us have become true information consumersat least in our personal lives. We use data such as historical prices, ratings and scores to decide which movie to see, which schools to attend, to how much to pay for a home. Were able to access and analyze this data because our favorite Internet applications have evolved familiar, easyto-use, and intuitive interfaces for data exploration. This mentalityand the expectations it fostershave spilled over into our business lives. Users have become more sophisticatedand more analytical. And managersat all levelswant to make quick, accurate business decisions based on hard data rather than intuition. Not long ago, managers were accustomed toand believed inprinted reports. When deeper understanding was required, they relied on business analysts: power-users who wrote SQL code, defined and revised reports, and (occasionally) employed complex tools to explore the data. But that was then. This is now. Today, business users (including managers) expect to do more themselves, depending less on business analysts who have, in turn, become more specialized, focusing on proactively identifying trends and opportunities instead of building reports on demand. The reports have also changed. No longer static, theyre highly interactive, allowing individual users to access them via the web, drilling, filtering and modifying them as needed. Analysis has changed, too. Now, sophisticated data visualization toolscommonly imbedded with an application or based in-memory to enable setup easedeliver at-a-glance insight. The rise of dashboards and mashboards. With the consumerization of information access and interactivity, there have evolved better methods for users to combine, share and interact with data. Users can now personalize their dashboards to meet their needs, including combining external data with internal corporate data. They can also interact with a wide range of powerful visualizations: Gauges and meters deliver at-a-glance info. Conditional formatting highlights exception conditions and simplifies visual navigation, helping users pinpoint specific items of interest. Sparkline charts help users quickly pinpoint departures from trends. Today, dashboards are real-time, making them useful for displaying operational data. And users can interact with them without any need to involve busy IT resources. In Web 2.0-speak, these are called Mashup applications. No longer does a one-size-fits-all conglomeration of a few important (though frequently disjointed) reportlets, designed by a single person in IT, make sense. Todays dashboards deliver important new capabilities that are personalized, interactive, and immediate. Doing more with less. Self-service reporting may be the most effective means at ITs disposal for improving its own BI productivity. In a recent TDWI survey, 66% of IT professionals said implementing self-service BI was high or very high in a list of potential costsaving measures. Why? Users get reports more to their liking, more quicklywhile IT frees up resources to work on more strategic initiatives. A Self-service BI checklist. As organizations examine BI solutions that can support self-service business intelligence, they should look for: Interactive Dashboards with drill-down and drill-through capabilities. Dashboard frameworks that let individual users choose dashboard layout and content. Flexible dashboard designers that can easily combine relational, non-relational and public addressable information. Parameter-driven and column-based filtering tools that let users focus on specific data. Granular data security with column and row suppression capabilities. Advanced visualization and easy-to-use charting. Conditional formatting.

Trend 2 BI Goes Mobile

Until recently, few businesses could deploy mobile BI. In a mid-2008 Aberdeen Group survey, only 17% 1 of companies were delivering BI data to mobile phonesthough fully 78% were interested in eventually doing so 2.
Heres why: The standard approach to mobile BI required display of reports via web browserbut devices rendered HTML inconsistently, and often quite poorly. The displays on mobile devices were too small to allow practical report viewing. Network speeds were too slow (until the wide spread adoption of 3G). Most mobile devices allowed limited interactivity, preventing users from filtering, re-sorting, drilling down or performing other important actions. Although users were interested, they werent yet feverishly demanding mobile BI. Rapid evolution of mobile devices and platforms added complexity. Nearly all of these obstacles have been overcome in the last two yearsin part due to the introduction of advanced mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android) and low cost, higher bandwidth wireless networks. Most of these deployments will allow users to view reports and perform lightweight analyses via small, portable dashboards4 but will not support creating reports or heavydata exploration. Many will use alerting or notifications, to let the on-the-go user immediately know when data begins to stray significantly from the norm. The proliferation of iPad and iPhone apps has spurred demand for anywhere- anytime information access. Web pages can be displayed as designed, without the re-rendering required by lesscapable mobile phones. 3G and 4G networks now offer significantly improved download speeds. Touch-screens have improved the user experience. Aberdeens 2010 study reveals starkly different attitudes from two years previous, with 23% of 146 companies having deployed, at this point, a mobile BI application or dashboardand an additional 31% planning to do so within the next year.3 By mid-2011, over 50% of companies will likely be using some form of mobile BI. In short, the Mobile BI5 era has arrived. It is quickly becoming a must-have for many business intelligence initiatives, especially where theres a need to disseminate critical, real-time business information to large numbers of people. In the 2010 Aberdeen Group survey, nearly a third of respondents intended to augment (or abandon) current BI vendors in support of Mobile BI because their current platforms were inadequate. Organizations searching for a BI solution with strong support for Mobile BI should focus on tools that: Render reports within a web-browser, using HTML formatting thats visually strong, both on computer monitors and on a wide variety of mobile devices. Facilitate the creation of custom BI apps aimed at specific devices. Support some level of report and analysis interactivityespecially sorting, filtering and hyperlinkingon mobile devices. Offer strong support for business rule-driven alerts and notifications. Feature well-designed security infrastructures that protect and withhold sensitive data from unauthorized mobile users.

Computerworld, Business intelligence goes mobile, July 14, 2010. The Aberdeen Group: 11/30/2010 Mobile Business Intelligence: A Path to Pervasive BI ComputerWorld August 9, 2010. Business intelligence apps go mobile, by Michael Fitzgerald. 4 Monash, Curt: DBMS2.com, What matters in mobile business intelligence 7/15/2010. 5 Dresner Advisory Services, LLC. DAS Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study. 2010.
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Trend 3 Collaborative and Social Features

Many BI users have been taking advantage of social networking venues like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for years, and have come to expect social functionality in all applicationsand for good reason.
Over the last few years, social networking has in fact explodedand not just among young people (Twitter is seeing its highest growth rates among users aged 39 to 51). Users expect appsBI includedthat help them more effectively collaborate with others, rapidly improve the understanding of content and make better-informed decisions. Employees and customers, who use the same social networking features they enjoy outside of work, are able to reach new levels of creativity. Here are some examples of collaborative and social features as theyre already being applied to business intelligence: Report tagging lets individuals help others to more quickly and easily find the reports they need. Comment and discussion threads let users ask questions of report authors, share views on report value, offer instructions for use, suggest improvements and more. Annotation features enable users to make reports more meaningful by setting context and providing background information; think of a store manager linking a given products low sales to supply problems. Up- and down voting enables users to more rapidly locate useful content by exposing a communitys assessment of a data point and/ or report value. User-provided ratings on report designs, dashboards, etc., give feedback to creators and help guide future output for consumers. Privacy settings enable users to selectively share their reporting, analysis and dashboarding designs and output with the right audience. Workflow features enable rules-based business intelligence collaborative processes including review and feedback, approval routing, decision tracking and more.

Trend 4 Business Intelligence in the Cloud

Why is the cloud topic one? Because it provides unprecedented flexibility in deploying applications, and because it has a huge potential for reducing costs.
With cloud technology, companies generally pay only for the hardware, software, bandwidth and other resources they useand not until they actually use it. Adjusting capacity is easy, and adjustments are immediately reflected in costs. The cloud is an umbrella term for three different ways to deploy software: 1. Software as a Service (SaaS). Here, the focus is on application software. Customers pay a periodic (usually monthly) subscription fee to access application software hosted by a solution provider; access is through a web-browser. Subscribers and end users avoid the issues of hardware setup, software installation, configuration or upgrades. Salesforce.com is an example of a SaaS product. 2. Platform as a Service (PaaS). With PaaS, subscribers pay for everything they need to build, maintain and run their own applications; everything is hosted by the provider, and accessed via web browsers. 3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS lets organizations rent access to hardware, deploying the applications they build or buy to these off-site servers. The subscriber performs some limited aspects of server management. Amazon Web Services provides a form of IaaS: access to fractional servers on a pay-as-you-go basis. The first two approachesSaaS and PaaS are most relevant to Business Intelligence. In the SaaS model, for example, organizations could subscribe to a specific analytic application, with all user access via browsers. The same hardware infrastructure and underlying software platform are used by all subscribers, all end users. Subscribers have nothing to install, configure or maintain beyond the devices on which their browsers run. In the PaaS model, the subscriber develops, implements and operates any specific applications, using the hosted development and runtime resources; access to those applications is via web browsers. BI architectures that are standardsbasedand easy to integrate via web serviceswill be best suited for the PaaS model. The role of the Cloud. In a recent TDWI survey, 31% of survey respondents saw cloud deployments as a major way to work with 2010s relatively small IT budgets.6 Companies are learning to use cloud-based BI creatively to meet business goals and lower costs. Here are some of the reasons: Rapid, hands-on evaluation of business intelligence solutions. Reduced costs during the development cycle, thanks to the ability to pay for fractional shares of dedicated servers. Elimination of capacity planningand the shortages or overspending that accompany it. Organizations can simply pay for the computing capacity their application uses, as its used. Responsiveness to occasional or periodic heavy computational workloads such as quarter-end or year-end analyses Fast and cost-effective means of executing software trials or proofs of concept, and of deploying short-term sandboxes for one-off analytic needs Organizations searching for cloud-based BI should look for: 1. Web-based user interfaces and access methods. 2. A broadly available environment, addressed from a variety of global locations and through and a wide range of services, preferably using web-based APIs. 3. Pay-as-you go pricing (the best way to gain the full economic benefit of cloud computing). 4. A secure environmentat network, identity management and authentication layers. 5. Elasticity: the ease of adjusting hardware capacity to meet changing needs. 6. Full support for APIs consistent with open web standards. 7. SaaS solution providersor those who may go that route in the foreseeable futureshould seek multi-tenancy features.
TDWI Best Practices Report: BI on a Limited Budget: Strategies for Doing More With Less, By Wayne W. Eckerson, July 2010
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Trend 5 Open Source Takes Over

Open source is now becoming mainstream in business intelligence. The tools are mature, proven, and making deep inroads in companies large and small.
In a TDWI Technology Survey in May, 2009, more than onethird of organizations reported using open source software in business intelligence, data integration or data warehousing applications. Why has open source BI become so popular? 1. Low cost. 87% of recent Gartner survey respondents expected considerable TCO (total cost of ownership) savings from using open source. With pressure to make every dollar count in a tough economy, open source is an obvious strategy. 2. Modern, lightweight, standards-based technology means developers can more readily and easily integrate BI with in-house technologies. 3. Mature solutions. At this point, a wide range of open source solutions has been proven suitable for production by many customers. Jaspersoft Reporting, for example commercially deployed hundreds of timeshas now been in use for more than 10 years. Just as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP/Perl/Python scripting) technology stack has come to dominate the development and deployment of web-based applications and websites, the BI sector is developing de facto open source software stacks as well. These typically include open source database, data integration and business intelligence tools. 4. Minimal risk. The open source model means organizations can try before they buy. BI projects, particularly those involving data warehouses, have traditionally faced substantial risks associated with uncertain (but costly) technology choices, some of which can amount to several hundred thousand dollars. Open source lets BI projects rapidly prototypeand even stress-test solutions with high volumes and user count simulation with minimal risk. 5. Strong user communities. Open source communities such as JasperForge greatly improve the stability and usability of open source software, by offering deep insight into user needs and providing low-cost, highly valuable pre-release feedback. 6. Flexibility. Open source technologies are typically newer, with open, forward-looking architectures, and are more flexible in terms of data source support and integration of new capabilities.

Trend 6 Big Data

According to a Gartner study, the volume of data generated in 2009 alone was greater than in the preceding 5000 years combined. Enterprise data in the next five years will grow an additional 650%.
An umbrella term coined in 2008, Big Data refers to technologies that allow organizations to quickly analyze and derive insight from massive data sets, the scale of which was unimaginable just a few years ago. Less expensive commodity hardware is also an enabler of these solutions, which can analyze and aggregate petabytes of data at once (1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes). How big is Big? Big Data technologies can also help any organization seeking to dramatically reduce query times, or to complete complex analysis tasks within smaller time windows. Big Data Innovations New technologies to store and speed the processing of massive amounts of data fall into three categories (some vendors offer hybrid solutions incorporating two or more of these approaches): 1. Hardware acceleration. These database appliances use DRAM or Flash memory instead of hard disks, improving physical read/write performance, and may also modify database code to take better advantage of multi-core processing and other advances. 2. Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Databases. These SQL-compliant databases are designed to spread the processing of data over many machinestypically so-called commodity servers. Some MPP databases also employ shared nothing architectures, which spread data storage over several machines as well, eliminating potential scalability bottlenecks. 3. Map-Reduce, Hadoop, and other NoSQL approaches. These approaches, collectively called NoSQL, or Not Only SQL, enable data access via programming languages without the use of SQL-based interfaces, and can spread data across many separate machines. Data structures are typically flat-file or other non-relational formats. NoSQL approaches are especially important for analysis tasks that cannot be efficiently coded in SQL. These include analyses that involve several passes over the data such as Monte Carlo simulationsand cases where the data is un- or semi-structured, such as text analysis. Map-Reduce and Hadoop are the most widely known NoSQL approaches. Map-Reduce is an algorithm that spreads data analysis tasks over several nodes, and then reduces all of the nodes results into a single result set. Hadoop is an open source implementation of Map Reduce, plus additional functionality, available from Apache. With these Big Data technology innovations, businesses can now perform analyses formerly considered infeasible, whether because there was too much data, the analyses took too long, or because the processing required was poorly suited to SQL. Preparing for Big Data BI. Regardless of which Big Data technologies are employed for an analytic task, business users still need to view and understand results. Given the potentially huge output sets, business users need ad-hoc reporting and analysis tools designed to find needles in haystacksincluding powerful data visualizations, summary-to-fine-grain drill-down, and dynamic filtering and sorting. These reporting, analysis and user interface capabilities must also be data format-agnostic, working seamlessly traditional RDBMSs, MPP databases, or files spread across the network.
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Mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes.
The Economist , 2/27/2010

While most companies have nowhere near a petabyte of data today, any organization storing more than a few terabytes can benefit from Big Data technologies. With traditional database, data warehousing, and business intelligence technologieseven when applying current best practices exceeding 10TB is difficult. 7 The predicted data growth rates mean organizations with only two or three TB of data will soon exceed the limits of traditional technologies.

TDWI Next Generation Data Warehouse Platforms by Philip Russo, 2009. Page 11.

Trend 7 Real-Time Insight

One challenge to the BI industry is a longstanding one: the need to reduce the time required to perform and complete query and analysis tasks. But the explosion of data and compression of business cycles has made this requirement more universal.
BI technologies have responded, incorporating man of the advances discussed here, with impressive results. Examples of analysis tasks shrinking in duration from days to minutesand hours to secondsare becoming more and more common. The business impact is significantand will become more so as these capabilities proliferate. Organizations are demandingand will realizethe ability to drive decisionmaking based on up-to-the-minute, fully-analyzed data. Consider the impact on marketing organizations, which spend millions on campaigns to generate interest and demand. Where it might have taken weeks or months to optimize these campaignswhile marketers awaited data collection and analysistheyre approaching the ability to evaluate, adjust and optimize these campaigns in a matter of hours. Advances like these are crucial in the age of search marketing campaigns that must evolve in real timeovernight just isnt fast enough. Similarly, operational decisions across the enterprise are becoming more urgent, further underscoring the need for real-time analytics. Its no longer enough to understand what happenedand whylast month, or even last week. Real-time insight can still be challenging in some situations, but the requirements will likely persist. BI solutions with forward-looking architectures are more likely to give enterprises the ability to meet these needs.

Conclusion
The business intelligence sector has undergone major changes, impacting enterprise appetites for operational data and strategic insight, while enhancing the technology available to deliver these insights. Not every IT and software development organization can act on all of these trends. However, as BI strategies evolve and BI project decisions are made, understanding these trends can help enterprises reap maximum benefit from their BI investments.

Learn More
The Economist, 2/27/2010. Special Edition on Data, Data, Everywhere. Using Collaboration to Extend the Reach of BI, by Colin White, BI Research. At International Summit on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Rome, June 2010. TDWI Technology Survey of May 2009 Gartner: Open Source in Information Management: State of Play. By Donald Feinberg, Business Intelligence Summit, April 12-14, 2010, Las Vegas.