I had the opportunity to moderate an ebizQ Webinar on the fast-changing world of business intelligence, with noted author Don Tapscott, Katrina Coyle, BI manager with Molson Canada, and SAP's Lothar Schubert. (Audio replay available here.)
Don Tapscott, who broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence, and recently co-authored Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, said BI is on the verge of a revolutionary transition.
Tapscott sees the Web 2.0 world -- with its high degree of collaboration -- changing the face of BI, to "collaborative intelligence." Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had "been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence."
Now, Tapscott continued, "for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through these new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration -- wikis, blogs and social networks."
"The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace."
The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. "Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that -- which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically." In-memory technologies are also making new generation BI technologies lightning fast as well.
Audio replay of the ebizQ Webcast, "The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence - Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded," is available here.
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