How Will Consumers Leverage BI in the Future?

Interesting Question! Amazon.com is already doing some things like "people who saw this product bought this" or "people who bought this bought this also".

Some bold innovative company could extend this further to include all kinds of innovative things for a group of people who would look up " Whate percentage of Toyota Prius owners bought Panasonic LCD TV 46 inches" or some such thing. It would be a stretch but there is no reason for companies like Amazon, not to experiment with BI on their sites. You never know!

Consumers will use BI far more pervasively than they do today. For them, BI will appear as an embedded service within their web application, serving up reports and charts (on demand) within the natural process flow of that application. So, designing and delivering BI services that behave simply and in a way consistent with all-things Web 2.0 will be principal to this pervasive BI of the future. Those building business and consumer web-based applications should recognize the inherent consumer-driven need for: collaboration, customization, elegant presentation and the ubiquitous access expected by this important new class of user (i.e., the consumer). I've written about this more broadly at: http://openbookonbi.blogspot.com/2009/02/2009-bi-market-prediction-4.html

The BI we know today will finally become truly customer-centric. For consumers, the only "reports" they will care about will be focused on their personal lives, such as their children's academic progress, household finances or energy consumption. The real advantage to consumers will come from what businesses can offer. They will be consuming recommendations either in the form of answers to targeted questions or filtered "friend" suggestions (people they might be associated with online). For example, a consumer might say, "I need walking shoes," to a retailer, and get a response, "according to your lifestyle and taste, as well as product reviews from people you know, we recommend the following three choices..." Those recommendations would be powered by Predictive Analytics because it recognizes the essential factors - attitudes, actions and attributes - that predict and drive consumer wants and needs (and reduce the overwhelming number of choices).

This is an excellent question and one that I've been toying with for a while. Brians response correctly highlights the importance of the pervasive nature of BI in consumer engagements and Web2.0 in general. I believe the true value of BI to consumers will be of a higher order than the current comparison of behaviours but rather as an integral component in the composition/selection of services. As more data is loaded into systems like Google Earth and we struggle with the complex privacy issues raised by social networking behaviours, service integration and information security, it will be advanced BI approaches that allow the consumer to both access information in a meaningful way and take the relevant actions across multiple parties that they are engaged with simultaneously. Consider the following consumer information - seasonal beach saturation reports for resorts in Florida; monthly/annual snowfall heatmap by resort in Austria; privacy settings comparison and control interface for social networking; presence privacy interface by degrees of separation. I think that consumer BI is the key to the next internet revolution.