Curt Monash had a great post around his vision of "Reinventing Business Intelligence." It appears Curt has a bunch of ideas on reinventing BI, but this time he covered the use of "natural language" and "text indexing." Great ideas, both. However, the notion of leveraging natural language as a way to reinvent BI seems to be a reoccurring theme.
"As for reality: For decades, dating back at least to Artificial Intelligence Corporation's Intellect, there have been offerings that provided "natural language" command, control, and query against otherwise fairly ordinary analytic tools. Such efforts have generally fizzled, for reasons outlined at the link above. Wolfram Alpha is the latest try; fortunately for its prospects, natural language is really only a small part of the Wolfram Alpha story."
Of course I already covered the Wolfram Alpha, and how it's indeed what the next generation BI systems should mimic. The reality is that using "natural language" command, control, and query will put the power of BI in the hands of those who would find more traditional BI tools difficult to leverage, and inflexible. We're so fond to leveraging Google to find information, that it seems only natural (get it?) that we leverage BI in the same way.
"It's a truism that each generation of dashboard-like technology fails because it's too inflexible. Users are shown the information that will provide them with the most insight. They appreciate it at first. But eventually it's old hat, and when they want to do something new, the baked-in data model doesn't support it."The core complaint that I get around BI technology is that in creating "dashboards" that have value in the context of business monitoring we're creating static and inflexible applications that have diminishing value. While using natural language queries has its own set of issues, the places you can take that type of interface is almost limitless. Clearly, this is the future, but the industry as yet to see it.
interesting post.
I agree with this post. People get used to anything quickly. Business leaders are always looking for something new to show them what is happening within their organizations, and once this "new" information becomes familiar, it becomes part of "business as usual" instead of "the new big tool". Perhaps the solution could be "drill-down" and "drill-up" applications, where you could not only see the data underlying the dashboard, but also see how this data feeds the business process as well. By having this dynamic element, information would not seem as static, and thus more interesting and useful.