Decision Intelligence
October 31st, 2008
There have been several notable articles recently about the emerging streaming analytics space and how it fits with traditional Business Intelligence (BI). Of course my ebook covers this in some depth.
Seth Grimes started a good debate here on where Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) fit in relation to traditional Business Intelligence. I don’t agree with the view that where BAM and CEP display data, this should be considered a subsets of BI. Clearly there is some superficial overlap, but data involved and the places they get deployed are very different.
What is clear is that there is growing interest in operational analytics, where intelligence can be used as part of a process.
Then yesterday I was speaking with Claudia Imhoff who was a breath of fresh air. She pointed me at a piece she co-authored with Colin White titled Decision Intelligence.
Claudia and Colin have done the industry a great service here by bringing clarity to a confused area. Their main point is that the term Business Intelligence is synonymous with analyzing data stored in data warehouses, but there are many instances where you need to analyze data where this is not an appropriate architecture. Examples include real time, web and unstructured data). So it’s difficult to call the whole category BI because that’s not what people understand it to mean.
They are absolutely right – and by drawing distinctions about Event Analytics (real time streaming analysis) and Content Analytics (unstructured data) being different and complimentary to existing traditional BI they have given us a simple taxonomy to describe how this category is evolving.
They also suggest that because BI is so synonymous with data warehouse and database analysis, that a new term is needed which encompasses traditional BI alongside these new emerging areas. They’ve dubbed it ‘Decision Intelligence.’ I hope it sticks.
