Increasingly, industry analysts and practitioners are connecting the dots between three emerging megatrends -- SOA, Web 2.0, and Business Intelligence. It's becoming increasingly clear that the combination of SOA and Web 2.0 technologies is changing the face of business intelligence.
These were the topics raised at a recent ebizQ Webinar -- which I had the opportunity to moderate -- 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, thanks to SOA and Web 2.0 approaches to technology innovation.
"Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production," he says. "They're changing the ways that we innovate, the ways theat we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world."
This has very profound implications for business intelligence, which is evolving into "collaborative intelligence." Don continued. "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."
"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.
Molson's Katrina Coyle also credits SOA with reshaping her company's ability to compete in a fast-changing and often fickle market. "One of the terrific things that we've had in the last year is service oriented architecture," she explained. "We can now deliver information to our business in any way they want.... we can drive information through emails, text, BlackBerries, and widgets. If we have issues anywhere in the supply chain, we can get that information out in real time to supply chain managers."
As with many SOA endeavors, corporate culture presents some barriers and challenges. "We've been brewing beer for a very long time," Katrina noted, stating that "when you've been doing something as long as we have, you get a lot of habits that are pretty well ingrained. Trying to shaking the business out of those habits is a challenge."
Molson's strategy to transform its organization includes reaching out to a new generation of younger adults through Web 2.0-based marketing strategies, and leveraging service-oriented architecture and data warehouse approaches to build its brands across the globe.
An important emphasis is real-time analytics, Katrina said. "We are constantly having to shift and change and shift and adjust very quickly to changes in the marketplace, " she explained. "We all have to be extremely agile. You can't spend a week trying to figure out whether the promotion is successful. You have to be able to react within hours."
It used to be that companies didn't know if a promotion was successful until then end of a quarter, if then. Real-time analytics can look at patterns and trends and provide insights if something is working or not, enabling a quick change in direction.
For example, one trend that Molson was able to jump on fairly rapidly was a sudden craze for cold beer in UK pubs -- long bastions of warm beer. Katrina explained that each of its global sites have their own go-to-market models, but all this information needs to be rapidly assimilated. "We have a data warehouse, with lots of information coming in different ways," she said. "It's not necessarily all coming from a centralized ERP system. We also have data coming in from AC Nielsen, for example. "We've got to bring that data in, and make sure that it has a harmonized look, so our business can actually make tactical decisions on it."
By adopting in-memory technology available through SAP's BI Accelerator, Katrina reports that Molson has been able to move data quickly through its data warehouse. "We're able to process data now in real time in our warehouse -- we're not tied to a load once a day or once a week."
Audio replay of the ebizQ Webcast, "The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence - Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded," is available here.
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