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EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Read and respond to what the EDS Fellows have to say about the future of technology on EDS' Next Big Thing Blog on eds.com.

The New Role For Business Intelligence

by Charlie Bess

I've mentioned in the past the role of pattern recognition changing in the future. Currently, most organizations confine their business intelligence (BI) use to highly skilled analysts. These analysts are expected to have deep industry and process expertise that helps them make sense of what the tool is saying.

In the future, this information will need to be incorporated into a wider range of the organization and packaged so it can be consumed by the target audience. The EDS Fellows have written about the issue of Attention Management and the need to ensure the audience does not become overwhelmed with the information flowing at them. It needs to be provided in context.

There are those who say that wide use of BI will be expensive because training everyone to use the tools and perform analysis will be hard. I believe if it takes that much training it is because the interface was written poorly. Most people do understand the context in which they work. The information needs to be presented in that context (e.g., there is something wrong with milling machine #3) and integrated with workflow. Therefore, little or no training should be required.

Sure, it will be harder in the software analysis and development activities, but at least that is performed by a small group and the activity (if done right) is only done once. BI today is underutilized but by using these kinds of techniques, it will move to be a powerful, continuous use business tool.

Published Friday, June 30, 2006 1:55 PM

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Comments

Posted by Ellen Weber Saturday, July 01, 2006 3:14 PM

Great post, Charlie. I'd like to hear even more about how you are using the term "business intelligence..." Can you elaborate a bit more?
<a href=”http://www.brainbasedbusiness.com”>Brain Based Business</a>

Posted by Charlie Bess Monday, July 03, 2006 10:25 PM

I saw on your site the definition "gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping people to make better business decisions" and that seems to be a good effective definition.

I am talking about the greater use of pattern recognition allowing the computers to focus on normal activities and the people to focus on turning anomalies into opportunities. Utilizing this scarce resource more effectively.

Posted by Sachdev Ramakrishna Tuesday, July 04, 2006 5:56 AM

Business Intelligence is an outstanding science to gain actionable insights to serving customers better based on deeper understanding of when they buy, what they buy, how much they buy etc. This works well in a world where the basis of consumer decisions are static so that the past is a great predictor of the future. Are there any intelligence tools that can enable us to anticipate disruptive patterns in consumption to therefore manage customer disloyalty,churn etc? e.g. the substitution of cork stoppers by glass in wine bottles

Posted by Charlie Bess Wednesday, July 05, 2006 3:09 PM

Sorry Sachdev, I don't know of any software that can predict the direction of market shifts. Experts can use their "gut feel" to do that. It does make me wonder how much of "gut feel" is actually the ability to recognize an anomaly earlier than everyone else and then focus attention on the implications.

Computers should be able to perform the early recognition function. People can use that warning to predict future market behavior using a wide variety of activities in the rest of the world.

Could a computer have predicted the need for something other than cork? Probably not. Could a person look at the personalization phenomenon and say what would be the impact on the current wine industry? Would they have spent the time without being spurred on by some other force? The wider use of BI may be a significant contributor to that external force.

Posted by Charles Nicholls Friday, September 08, 2006 10:41 AM

Hi Charlie

You’re spot on with the your comments about ‘context.’ Let me extend the though a bit further.

Today we rely on the reader of the report / viewer of the dashboard to interpret the data correctly in the context of historical performance, and their knowledge and experience of the business. By sticking to a paradigm which essentially reports on historical performance, we are relying on the human analysis of data.

This is a theme that I’ve developed in by free eBook “In Search of Insight” which can be downloaded at http://www.seewhy.com

BI companies have struggled to deploy beyond the 5% barrier of potential users, and this reliance on the presentation of historical data is significantly to blame. As soon as you want to deploy more broadly, in particular into operations, then the requirements change:

(1) Latency becomes very important. I’ve lost count the number times that I’ve heard something along the lines of “the reports arrives just too late to be really useful.” In fact analysts Ventana just produced a survey http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300872 which found that “100 percent of respondents who said their alerts did not provide guided analysis also said their alerts were always out of date.”

(2) Operations teams require context. In fact ‘information in the context of the business process’ is critical in an intraday environment. There just isn’t enough time to start rooting around to try and interpret the data manually. So operational Business Intelligence systems need to be able to provide all the information in one place, and in a way that paints a crystal clear illustration of the problem or opportunity at hand. This is the so called ‘actionable insight’ that has been so over hyped and rarely delivered.

Of course in a real time world, then the context can be used by computers to automatically interpret the data for you and provide you with problems or opportunities, rather than presenting data. This is a very exciting area because it enables computers to perform tasks that human analysts are spectacularly bad at: automatically checking and validating every transaction, for example, so that exceptions or errors can be spotted.

This capability opens up completely new avenues for Business Intelligence as a real time process step, and enables closed loop automated actions to be driven off the analysis.

Posted by BI Helper Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:25 PM

Good post...I agree with your statment that BI today is underutilized and can be utilized more effectively with techniques mentioned in your post.

BI Helper

http://datawarehousingsites.blogspot.com/