Call me stupid but am I the only one that's been reading a lot of articles and listening to lot of seminars about "Business Intelligence 2.0" and still doesn't get it?
So-called 2.0 technologies – particularly the Web variety – are creeping their way to the top of conference agendas and no doubt many corporate IT meetings. Vendors and analysts are banging the 2.0 drum loudly, each throwing up their own definition of what 2.0 means – technically, metaphorically, and even by what it was not. One pithy gem offered by one so-called industry analyst at a recent BI Summit is that "BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers." Nice to know. But still leaves me in the dark as to what BI 2.0 is.
Here are just a few of the topics that I've heard to be consistent with the BI 2.0 over the past six months: Real-time BI, an architecture that's been kicking around for a decade that refers to a fundamental shift away from latency-ridden "load-query-analyze" data warehouses towards proactive event-driven analysis; Pervasive BI, characterized by wide-scale web-deployment and user-friendly tools; Embedded analytics in business processes and operational business applications to drive smarter processes and close the gap between analysis and action; A new generation of self-sufficiency and interactivity that shifts the balance away from control away from IT departments towards BI business users.
I could go one here. But the point I'm trying to make is BI 2.0 is a fluid term that can't (as yet) be pinned down to any consistent definition. And without that it becomes as esoteric as Edward De Bono's "Po" creative thinking system.
The underlying technology components and concepts that seem to prop up BI 2.0 aren't necessarily new either. Yet this hasn't stopped BI vendors and analysts (yes we're also to blame) from attaching the BI 2.0 moniker to their products, marketing collateral and conference agendas – even in the absence of an agreed universal understanding of what it entails.
So why does the industry feel compelled to use it? BI 2.0 is really a direct response to the Web 2.0 hype – another can of worms that's usually meant to refer to Ajax-style applications, greater user interaction with on-screen data and loosely coupled mash-up architectures and more. Taking a BI 2.0 tag onto your products tells the market that your BI strategy is somehow advancing. Anything Web 2.0 inherently implies modern technology and architectures that show you're not a Luddite when it comes to keeping up with the Jones' in the corporate IT world.
By adding the 2.0 moniker to their products, BI vendors, particularly startups entering the market, also want to portray themselves as both visionary and disruptive forces. Why? Because it’s the only way they can hope to dislodge conservative IT dollars being spent on "safe" bets in BI like Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Microsoft.
If the market is poised to launch itself into a BI 2.0 wave, then whatever happened to BI 1.0 you might ask? When BI first hit the IT scene some thirty years ago, on one ever called it a 1.0 release. Yet three decades later, we're on the verge of longest major point releases in possibly the history of IT! But if you take a look at the laundry list of technologies now being thrown under the 2.0 umbrella – performance management, corporate portals, embedded BI, search, advanced visualization and predictive analytics – there's not much radically new in BI 2.0 that's not already been proposed sometime over the last five years.
Therefore I'm wondering if in five years to come whether we'll be talking about a BI 2.5 point release or a full step up to BI 3.0, whatever that might be. Perhaps a better take on explaining this "version upgrade" of BI is a confluence of technical and business trends that have been evolving BI over the past decade, rather than thinking of it as a sudden sea-change in functionality, tools and how we build, buy or implement BI. BI 1.0 is certainly not done and dusted. And no one is going to throw away their maturing BI 1.0 investments overnight because BI 2.0 is built on the same technical foundation.
Bottom line BI 2.0 is more hip than hype right now. BI 2.0 itself is a meaningless term that can mean whatever it wants to anyone – it's not even a standard and there's no request for comments around it. BI 2.0 isn't a product or platform and certainly can't be labeled as a specific point release since the underlying technologies it relies on are not new. Technically at least, BI 2.0 sounds like a classic case of mature Cabarnet in a new 2007 bottle.
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