Business Intelligence Goes "Mainstream" - Again

Cindi Howson says business intelligence went mainstream at info360 this week, but the title of her article is a bit misleading. I don't think she's saying that BI, which was already a US$3.6 billion industry 10 years ago, has suddenly become a viable industry. What she is really saying is that BI is now regarded as mainstream by the content, knowledge and records management professionals who organize and populate info360.

To those professionals I say: Welcome to the party.

The four topics that Howson identifies as subjects of presentations certainly do represent some of the biggest challenges and most exciting opportunities in the BI world:

• Pervasive BI - getting the appropriate BI to all of the places in the organization where it will make a difference.
• Mobile BI - get the information you need when and where you need it.
• BI in the Cloud - addressing budgetary, resource, and scalability issues with software / platform / infrastructure as a service.
• Social media BI - making BI a two-way conversation, and turning information consumers into information conduits

These topics (plus the notably absent topic of location intelligence) are the BI sizzle. We'll know these content, knowledge and records management professionals are serious about BI when they start spending their time discussing the far less flashy, but very pragmatic, integration issues - how to make business intelligence available to content management workflows.

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What Is Well Managed BI?

The whole point to implementing a business intelligence system is to improve operational efficiencies within your organization by delivering timely, accurate and relevant information to all stakeholders and decision makers. BI systems extract the most relevant information from your mission-critical systems and deliver it as actionable information to the people who need it.

You use business BI to judge the health of your enterprise, and to decide on appropriate courses of action. Your BI system monitors your Enterprise solutions, but how do you monitor your BI system to ensure the information being delivered is timely and accurate?

Well managed BI:

• Ensures that you have the Insight into your system to know that it is working within established parameters;
• Notifies an Administrator when the system is not functioning within those parameters, and provides the means for quick and easy remedial action;
• Enables Pervasive Distribution of personalized reports across the Enterprise; 
• Uses data visualization technology such as Location Intelligence to gain greater speed to insight; and
• Makes regulatory compliance easy through Storage capabilities that archive documents securely and enable selective restore. 

These are some of the subjects I hope to discuss on this blog.

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