The Future of BI

Computerworld - We asked some industry experts and analysts for their boldest predictions about the future of business intelligence technology. Here's a collection of their most provocative thoughts:

Business intelligence is becoming more directly connected to business processes in two different ways. BI will be increasingly used to analyze business processes, and BI will also be incorporated within business processes. In the former case, expect to see business process dashboards as the next wave of business performance management, bringing together data on process events from multiple applications. In the latter case, expect to see BI moving from just providing information to decision-makers to actually automating repeatable, operational decisions for activities such as setting prices, inventory levels and many other areas that were formerly the domain of "gut feel."
-- Henry Morris, analyst, IDC, Framingham, Mass.

Over the next five years, BI applications will become as commonplace as spreadsheet applications within all organizations that are midsize or larger. Organizations that utilize BI technologies most effectively will rise up as leaders within their industries and distinguish themselves from their competitors. Within the next two years, a significant event will expose the weaknesses of current approaches to securing data within the private or public sector that will cause politicians to enact legislation that will require greater security of data by using encryption technology for data storage and access. By 2015, BI applications will have evolved to handle structured and unstructured data and will become a component of a broader category called knowledge management.
-- Jonathan Wu, senior principal, Knightsbridge Solutions LLC, Chicago

Over the next three years, the pervasiveness of business intelligence technology will explode, by as much as fivefold, as three technology trends converge: the availability of 64-bit in-memory processing technology improving BI performance by factors of 10 to 100; the service-enabling of business applications; and the growth of rich Internet applications, or RIA. Together, they enable organizations to leverage BI in new and innovative ways. Imagine you've been driving with the parking brake on, and suddenly you release it. You not only go cheaper and faster to the same places as before, but you also explore new places and opportunities.
-- Lothar Schubert, director of SAP NetWeaver product marketing, Walldorf, Germany

Analytic results can be clearer if they include location. Why? The old saw sums it up: Everything has got to be somewhere. Location is a fundamental organizing principle for the ways that people think and act. But the BI community has been slow to adopt geographic capabilities, perhaps because it has been too hard. That's all changing as standards mature, integration becomes easier and geographic data becomes less expensive. Also, a whole new crop of location-determining devices like GPS, RFID, networked sensors and cellular networks are coming online. These factors create both the capability and demand for location-specific BI.
-- David Sonnen, IDC's consultant for spatial information management, Bellingham, Wash.