James Taylor's Decision Management

Intelligent Enterprise ran an article on Gartner: Emerging Technologies Will Help Drive Mainstream BI Adoption and it made me wonder what "mainstream" means in this context. After all, most of the technologies don't really change the basic premise of Business Intelligence - that the purpose of BI is to deliver insight to some kind of knowledge worker. But does this count as mainstream? I don't think so.

To make "BI" mainstream would mean that everyone in an organization - down to the people paid minimum wage at the front line - are making better decisions thanks to the understanding an organization has of its data. Indeed, it should go further and ensure that the machines that deal with customers (ATMs, Kiosks,websites) can also use this insight. Yet visualization, in-memory analytics and search integrated with analytics do not enable this - in fact they just make old-style BI prettier or faster. SOA and SaaS are more interesting as they enable decision services but they are still not enough. To make "BI" mainstream it must change from BI as reporting to something more decision-centric - it must focus analytic insight on the making of decisions in software not just in people's heads. This takes rules, predictive analytics, data mining and decision management not more "BI".