Thomas,

Thanks for a great post. You touch on many of the reasons why I started LucidEra. I have spent over a decade as both a consultant and a vendor of traditional BI solutions, and even though I have always been passionate about how much value these solutions can bring to a company, I have been equally frustrated by how complicated they are to set up and use. Why is it that just to get basic insights into my business, I have to deploy an extremely complicated Business Intelligence technology stack in-house? It's like having to build your own nuclear reactor in your basement just to get electricity. Instead, I wanted to create a company that would make Business Intelligence something that's simple to set up, simple to use, and highly affordable. The on-demand model is what makes this possible.

Just as your power company runs the nuclear reactor for you so you can just use the electricity, the same logic and the same benefits apply to having a company run your business intelligence engine for you so you can focus on using the resulting data to improve your business. That is, you can focus on the insight you get, not the infrastructure it traditionally required.

This trend is going to continue. The first wave of on-demand applications were the on-demand transactional applications that capture the data your company generates. These applications focused on getting the data in, and making you more efficient -- that is, helping you do things faster. The next wave are the on-demand analytic applications that pull that data back out so you can analyze it and optimize your business. Here, the focus is on making you more effective -- that is, helping you focus on doing the right things, not just doing things faster. As the economy marches towards a recession, focusing on becoming more effective is going to be critical to a company's survival.

Thomas,

Nice work! Thanks so much for your engaging commentary on these important trends.

In consulting for various corporations, I’ve observed increasing levels of interest and usage around both these strategies.

Historically, BI SaaS has been concentrated in the sales and marketing areas and the emphasis has been on outsourcing the BI tools/platform vs. the underlying business process. Some organizations are now looking to go further by outsourcing some of the data analysis and mining activities necessary to yield valuable support to business decision-making. Already a viable approach in data-intensive industries such as financial services, outsourcing analytics is now gaining broader acceptance across more industry segments.

Going forward, we can expect to see BI embedded more deeply within business workflow using open standards and architecture. Eventually this moves us closer to the point where there is not a distinction between business process and business intelligence.

The evolution of role-based, process-centric BI within the service-oriented architecture paradigm offers potential for more adaptable, platform-independent BI capabilities which can be more easily offered as services.

On the topic of self-service BI, I’d add that it can be viable with the right governance model which balances business unit autonomy with enterprise standards and common master data. The enterprise oversight is important to prevent inconsistent or contradictory information from being spread across the organization, creating inefficiencies, risk or worse. Centralized master data (for analytic dimensions such as customer and product) makes the self-service experience more efficient and leaves the door open for consistent calculation of performance measures across the organization when senior management needs a true enterprise picture.

While SaaS and self-service BI can offer accelerated deployment times and an improved user experience, it’s still critical to make sure BI capabilities align with the strategic vision and are balanced within a broader framework of disciplined information management practices.

For more discussion on enterprise business intelligence strategies, check out my recent podcast at the link below.

http://www.podtech.net/home/5056/how-intelligent-is-your-enterprise-business-intelligence-strategy

Best regards,

Larry

This is not surprising to one who has followed several of these suppliers (Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects) for over a decade. They have typically marketed to end user departments, like accounting or finance, with the promise they can install the product quickly and get something up and running "without bothering IT". This was very true in the 90's when it was just a matter of getting CDs from the vendor and installing on one PC or the company file server.

However, when the project becomes too complex for them to handle they often come running to IT to bail them out. This was true then and is especially true today as the products have become multi-tiered and integrate many different industry standard technologies (web servers, app servers, relational databases)instead of the proprietary file formats on which the products were originally based.

I'm involved in a Hyperion installation now where insufficient infrastructure planning is causing problems because this was an afterthought during the sales process.

I think your articles and blog make a number of points to address that IT is moving in the right direction with Business Intelligence (BI). Many BI vendors have made exceptional leaps and bounds in determing what the business needs are from operations, finance, marketing, etc and aligned those business needs with technology. This allows the BI vendors to know what the business needs and as more enterprises adopt best practices such as ITIL, COBIT, or Six Sigma, then vendors in the BI toolsets can create a tool that will meet most organization's needs out of the box. If companies continue to standardize their processes internally in IT as well as across the organization we will continue to see more tools developed in not only BI but other technology tools that will address issues without custom configuration.

I think your article nails the biggest problem with reporting & BI. That is why I created Windward Reports.

Please take a look at www.windwardreports.com - what we do is enable users to design their reports (operational, BI, doc gen, etc) in Word and Excel. The bottom line is that there is no training required, no learning curve, and we use the best known and most highly research UI in existence.

I would very much like to get your impressions of Windward.

thanks - dave

ps - There is one downside to Windward Reports - Cubicle War