If you missing the live broadcast of BI in Action you can still view the archive recordings. It was a great look at the growing importance of BI to the organization.

Bill Gassman, Research Director, Gartner, talked about how BI is being used to Drive Business Performance . Bill talked about BI as "an umbrella term for applications, infrastructure, platforms, tools, and best practices," and gave examples of how organizations that make the best use of business intelligence have significant competitive advantage. In fact, he showed how the BusinessWeek top 50 Performers all used BI extensively for better decision making. He also talked about how BI is changing, and discussed a framework that includes:
- Alignment: with strategic business objectives and sponsors
- Metrics: Agreed upon Performance Management Framework
- Skills: Process managers and developers
- Integration: Reduction of analytic application silos
- Cost: Efficiency/scalability of analysis & delivery capabilities
- Information: Availability, agility, transparency and data quality

Bill also talked about the trends and the technologies to watch over the next 5 years, especially the combination of BAM, BI and BPM for enabling rapid business response. In fact, Bill indicated that companies that fail to keep up with these trends do so at their own peril. So be sure to tune into this webinar.

For those of you looking for a BI primer, look no further than Boris Evelson's presentation on the Current State of the BI Market. . Boris defines Business Intelligence (BI) as "a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information". He had one slide that outlined all of the different capabilities of BI and all the different technologies and features required to deliver a set of functionality.

Boris then gives a refreshingly candid overview of all the vendor offerings in the market based on this categorization of capabilities. I highly recommend Boris' presentation to anyone interested understanding BI, and the different technology options. Boris' presentation ran a bit long so we didn't have much time for questions (but it was worth it). However, he was kind enough to answer some questions offline so check them out. Boris also suggests checking out Forrester's Information and Knowledge Management blog.

It seems the panel discussions are always the most popular sessions and this conference was no exception.
Rob Risany, Director, Product Marketing, Savvion, Michael Corcoran, Chief Marketing Officer, Information Builders, Guy Weismantel, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, Business Objects and Joe McKendrick, BI in Action Blogger all participated in a discussion on the Role of BI in BPM and SOA. This was a very interesting discussion that really highlights in growing importance of BI services within the overall architecture, and the role it plays in making business perform better. Definitely worth a hour of your time.

Let us know what you think.

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Boris Evelson gave a terrific overview of the BI market today at the BI in Action conference. I plan to review it in my blog tomorrow. However, there were a number of questions we did not have time to address. Boris was kind enough to answer some so I wanted to get them posted right away. Thank you Boris!

1. You have not really addressed the area of Human Capital BI? What's your view of that space?

Answer. I think this is an emerging area with multiple opportunities. There’s a triad of high level components in any
organization: processes, data and HR. While there’s been many innovations in the process and data analytics, HR analytics (work force optimization, for example) is playing catch-up.

2. Same question as before: is the consolidation of the market continuing on its way with other major operations? Who will be the next target: SAS, BO, Microstrategy? And the predator: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle?

Answer. I do agree that there will be almost complete consolidation in the BI market within the next two years, and the “dark ages” of BI may set in since Oracle/Microsoft/IBM/SAP and others having acquired all pureplays will have to devote most of their time to integration, not innovation. Next transactions will probably be initiated by HP and maybe Teradata, since both are contending to be “BI players” but really don’t offer any BI tools other than infrastructure and databases. If the acquirers are HP or Teradata, than Business Objects will probably be the first target, since BO acquisition gives the buyer an almost complete BI “stack”. Cognos will be next on the list. A combination of Teradata/Microstrategy or Netezza/Microstrategy may also be interesting since the arrangement will be an awesome VLDB (very large database) front end/back end combination.

3. Can u tell more about advance ETL process & SOA?

Answer. Since the early days of BI it’s been a dream of every architect to put data messages on ESB (enterprise service bus) and consume them as needed by ODS/DW/DM. It’s a difficult process both from the business (defining and agreeing on a standard message format) and technical (pub/sub architecture, message queues, long transactions, multi phase commits, etc) points of view. Little has changed, except for fewer protocols and more standardization (.NET, J2EE). Only a few forward thinking enterprises have achieved this advanced level of BI architecture.

4. Often real analysis requires data from various processes and therefore analytics imbedded with processes are too narrowly focused. What is the best practice in addressing this.

Answer. Look for generic BPM vendors (not horizontally or vertically focused solutions) that (can) span all enterprise processes: Pegasystems, Savvion, Lombardi. And look for generic BPM/BI solutions from Tibco/Spotfire, Cognos OEMing Lombardi and Pegasystems just announcing a partnership with Panorama Software.

5. Do the Microsoft solutions support Mainframe data?

Answer. All open architecture (Wintel, Risc, Unix/Linux) BI vendors (including Microsoft) support mainframe data only indirectly via gateways and EII (enterprise information integration) middleware.

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Last week I spoke Lyndsay Wise, Senior Research Analyst for the Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management sector at Technology Evaluation Centers about web-based BI solutions.

Lyndsay cited 4 different types of web based tools. "The first one, is portal deployment, the second one are full Web-based BI suites. The third are actually hosted or SaaS-based models. And the fourth are open source." I must admit it took me some time getting my head around that analysis. The last 3 seem to have to do with how you buy a web-based BI solution and Lyndsay gave some good advice in the webcast as to what to look for, and what to think about when you evaluate solutions. But the first one - portal deployment - seems to be Lyndsay's way of saying the original web based solutions were vendors offering reporting via a browser.

While Lyndsay focused on web based BI for our discussion, my recent discussions with BI vendors opens up many more areas for comparing BI solutions in terms of capabilities. For example, there are the traditional BI vendors that focus on analytics, now integrating with BPM solutions for delivering operational BI within the context of a business process. There are Business Activity Monitoring solutions with complex event processing that correlate disparate events to define business patterns and deliver predictive capabilities. There are BI gadgets that can deliver desktop KPIs. These business level intelligence solutions can be used as part of business performance management. In fact there's a lot of technology out there that can go under the BI banner.

Want to hear more? BI in Action will be broadcast live on Web., June 20th. Tune into Bill Gassman's keynote at 11:00 am ET on June 20th to learn more about Business Performance. For an overview of the whole market tune into Boris Evelson's keynote at noon ET. Then at 1:00 pm tune into the panel discussion on the role of BI in BPM and SOA. Bring your questions.

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