LogiXML Business Intelligence Community

Reporting in from Gartner on Current BI trends

by Rachel Shortt

Fresh from the Gartner BI Summit in Chicago last week, I wanted to explore some of the key themes we witnessed. Primarily, the focus was about future trends and the idea of 'Pervasive BI' which we feel at LogiXML is the Next Generation of Business Intelligence.

This next generation of BI represents a movement toward easier, more collaborative, more integrated, and more interactive BI that will help you deliver useful reporting and BI applications that users really want and that they’ll really want to use. And, it is focused on doing it cost-effectively.

After attending various sessions on Future Trends, Market Dynamics, Real-time Business Intellignce, and Performance Managements with Gartner analysts Betsy Burton, Donald Feinberg, Bill Gassman among others, a number of key themes became apparent. These were a few of the interesting concepts:

- The idea of Business Intelligence actually converging with everyday business applications so that it is transparent to the user and the idea of more process-driven integration which is best for time-sensitive requirements. This will even give rise to a new type of role--a 'process architect' who will have to coordinate both BI and application needs.

- BI vendors will need to componentize BI and break the different pieces apart and let the customer put the pieces together as needed.

- Historic and traditional types of reporting will never go away, but these realtime/embedded BI services into Business applications.

- SOA will change the landscape of BI more dramatically with the idea of more Business Intelligence services, e.g., Search Services, OLAP Services, Reporting Services, Transaction Services, etc.

- In-memory analytics to support performing ad hoc queries on the fly

- Search was a hot topic as well as the concept that users are now driving BI requirements. In alignment with those concepts, more Google-type search UIs for BI will come into demand. In the Google era, we're actually training ourselves to use this style of interface.

- Aligning business strategy with key metrics will become increasingly important with many mainstream companies implementing performance management strategies by 2010.

I was very excited when it became clear that LogiXML and our recently released Logi 8 platform is well on (and sometimes ahead of!) the predicted and recommended path with such key features as AJAX-powered dashboards, a fully 'integratable' BI layer that consists of powerful components to support the convergence of BI and business applications, advanced security based on roles and types of information, and simplified BI for the everyday 'knowledge worker.'

Abstract

Report from the TDWI World Conference on 'Operational BI'

by Rachel Shortt
LogiXML BIz Comm Editorial Staff
May 21, 2007

The Logi Team and I just returned from the TDWI World Conference Spring 2007 in Boston, MA. We had great attendee interaction and, as is the norm with TDWI, very practical, informative sessions about BI in action.

As you know, most conferences seem to have a theme in the sessions themselves as well as in the questions that attendees are asking. Just as we noted in the Gartner BI Summit sessions in March, the Data Warehousing world is also focusing on how to best reach more users across the organization for better, more immediate decision-making. Session topics at TDWI were related to operational BI, handling both structured and unstructured data, and techniques like Search. Noticeably, many attendees also seem to be looking for ways to implement predictive analytics into their BI suites.

Making Better Decisions with an Operational Data Store

Claudia Imhoff, of Intelligent Solutions, Inc. and an active member of the B-EYE Network community presented an all-day session on the Operational Data Store. [Operational Data Store in Action, May 14, 2007, TDWI World Conference]. Noteable ‘take-aways’ from this session included recognition of:

How data warehousing is having to move into the operational environment.

The impact of operational BI on your IT environment is pretty significant. There’s a substantial increase in the number of users, volume of data and required performance.

You need to develop a good understanding of ‘right-time’ data delivery vs ‘real-time’. Operational BI projects should be strategically needed, not just for the sake of ‘real-time’ information.

Operational BI essentially embeds itself into day-to-day operations to make immediate impacts on improving business processes. The session explored ways of doing that with the concept of an Operational Data Store (ODS) that only serves the needs of operational BI and an ODS application. The ODS application may be part of a CRM system, set up to meet compliance requirements or for other operational needs. The ODS will also require a new concept in traditional BI and data warehousing of Process Design.

SOA Will Hold It All Together

In line with BI 2.0 concepts, using SOA to communicate appropriately among the transactional and business intelligence IT environments becomes key for operational BI. Sharing data across databases and various domains remain issues for organizations due to the disparate data sources, application servers and applications. SOA enables you to call various services from various environments at the right time in your operational workflows.

If You Build It, Will They Use It?

Another key consideration of operational BI is to make the BI tools or delivery mechanisms easy to use. Extending BI to operational personnel means you may be serving tens of thousands of users. These users are expert in their operational activities but are not used to BI per se.

Seamlessly integrating BI into their experience becomes key. Data visualization, which enables at-a-glance understanding, also becomes even more important for operational users. And, dashboard capabilities can help not only provide a view into the current state of operations, but also provide the means for alerts, notifications, and invoking of other processes for users or automated processes to take immediate action. These capabilities become critical for allowing you to change business workflow as business scenarios change.

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