BI and Enterprise 2.0

Came across an interesting article from Colin White, who has been chronicling changes in the BI and integration worlds for some time now.  It's called Using Enterprise 2.0 for Business Intelligence, and worth the read. 

Here are some of the points that stood out for me:

Enterprise 2.0 does not replace current approaches – it simply provides innovative ways of quickly building some urgently needed business user capabilities.

This is a great opening point.  Business users and BI analysts should agree that bringing in some more modern Web features to BI is a good thing.  CIOs might like the fact that they can do it on the cheap.  Existing BI vendors might not like this (more on that later).

Most business intelligence applications focus on creating reports and analytics that aid executives and analysts in developing and optimizing strategic and tactical business plans and initiatives. As I have discussed in previous Business Intelligence Network articles, companies now want to take business intelligence to the next level by using it to drive daily business operations and to expand its use to a broader set of users, both inside and outside of the organization.

Another good point, something many of us have been calling "BI for the masses."  Some have derisively termed this "BI for the unwashed masses," feeling that not everyone can understand what they are seeing.  This is certainly an unenlightened view, and a dangerous one if your competition puts information into their customers' and employees' hands.

And what does the technology look like.  Here are three of my favorites, that fall in line with what we've been talking about here at Ipedo for some time:

1. Information Exploration and Analysis: Employs technologies such as federated queries, enterprise search, and content analytics to explore and analyze unstructured and semi-structured business content, including that produced by the information collaboration component.
    
2. Information Integration: Extends traditional enterprise data capture and transformation technologies with the ability to process unstructured and semi-structured business content, including that produced by the information collaboration component.   
    
3. Information Syndication and Delivery: Uses syndication protocols (RSS and ATOM, for example), syndication servers, and data mashups to publish and deliver all types of structured information and unstructured business content to enterprise applications and users.

And he closes with this synopsis of what the current BI vendors are doing:

Enterprise 2.0 approaches have started to gain momentum outside of the business intelligence environment, but BI vendors have been slow to consider, or adopt, new Web 2.0 technologies. This has opened up an opportunity for smaller vendors outside of the traditional BI marketplace to compete with established BI vendors for a slice of the Enterprise 2.0 BI environment. These new vendors will be able to move quickly into the BI marketplace with lower cost and more usable solutions that may not have the functionality of the big BI platforms, but nevertheless will be attractive for addressing certain types of business problems. Meanwhile, the large BI platform vendors will find it difficult to move rapidly to compete because of their poorly integrated and older product architectures. It will be interesting to see how this battle will emerge over the next two to three years.

This is certainly true.  Why, one large BI vendor who shall remain nameless is still built on CORBA.  CORBA!  How many times have you seen that on the agenda at a Web 2.0 conference?  The point is that many product suites are showing their age.  In most cases, a more modern approach can yield just the results you need.