Welcome to the Terrible Twos -- and talk about growing pains. A new generation of technologies, born in this century, are out of the crib and getting into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, knocking over everything that isn’t nailed down.
There's Web 2.0, Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 -- merry mashups and wild wikis that make computing fun for techies and non-techies alike. (Some even attempted to introduce the use of the term SOA 2.0 -- but were quickly stomped down.)
But these Terrible Twos are more than fun and games, they represent the future of business as we know it. David Precopio said it all in a post a couple of months back, noting that the 2.0s “are real and will drive how organizations communicate with customers and business partners now and in the future. For many companies, these 2.0 technologies will determine whether they are in business in five years.“
Web 2.0 employs online, collaborative tools and environments -- such as blogs, wikis, mashups, and Software as a Service -- to provide access to services across the global Web. Companies that can harvest and leverage these capabilities may realize significant competitive advantage.
Now, John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, speaking at the AIIM/On Demand trade show in Boston, has taken the Web 2.0 concept and added a BI twist -- "Business Intelligence 2.0."
Schwarz said that current BI software is the next step above document tracking, helping users to fix the inefficiencies in how they save and share their data. Future BI suites can be far more powerful using Web 2.0-style technology and behavior, Schwarz said. For example, BI software could use social networks to give users the power to pool resources and buying power, he said. Next-generation BI software could rely on a large community of individuals to contribute to a database and correct their own mistakes, in a model similar to the Wikipedia.org online encyclopedia.
Business intelligence could, then, truly represent the collective intelligence of an entire community of users. This could greatly expand its capabilities, which still remain limited to power users and analysts within the walls of their respective enterprises.
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