Getting to Why

I just read this article by Dan Everett of Ventana Research which appeared in Intelligent Enterprise. The article is titled ‘Putting Analysis Back in BI’ which is a worthy subject on which I have to comment – after all as CEO of SeeWhy we should have an opinion about BI and in particular about traditional BI’s failings in helping users get to ‘why’ not just ‘what.’

The premise of the article is that ‘BI is more than just reporting’ and goes on to criticize the mainstream BI vendors for their over heavy focus on reporting. Dan is undoubtedly right – a lot of what is wrong with BI is based around the report. After all, there’s lots of evidence showing that users don’t look at reports. They’re used primarily as reference documents, not for the day to day running of the business.

All is not well in BI, and users are increasingly frustrated by its failings. BI promised to ‘democratize’ access to information, to make it easy for ordinary business men and women to get the facts and figures they need to do their jobs more effectively. This was a big promise, but increasingly users of BI tools are frustrated with what they get, how, and when they get it.

This frustration by business users is most often stated as ‘Information arrives just too late to be really useful.’ While at first blush this appears to be a timing issue, in fact it is only part a latency problem. It’s clear that information needs to be acted upon in order to be useful, and therefore latency is very important. An after the fact retrospective look back is clearly far from optimal and this gets to the heart of a large part of what’s wrong with BI. Business people would universally agree that they don’t need more reports. What’s lacking is real insight.

Businesses are seeking ways of making processes smarter. And this demand for ‘smarter processes’ doesn’t mean simply reporting on processes, but embedding analytics within the processes themselves. This much easier than you might think - means to do so are all embodied in the heterogeneous messaging technologies underpinning many of today’s transactional systems and the next generation of SOA and event driven architectures. As the world has embraced business process management and event driven architectures, these in turn form the underpinnings for the next generation of process oriented Business Intelligence capabilities.