With core business processes already heavily automated, the emphasis of investment
in ICT is moving away from transactional systems, as organisations find poorer returns
in extending commoditised applications to less predictable areas of their business.
Innovation is shifting towards information-intensive activities, where workers at
all levels require a new generation of systems that are characterised by the need
for engagement and collaboration with customers, citizens, business partners, and
colleagues. In this environment, business intelligence not only needs to evolve
from its roots in the transactional domain, but along with information management
becomes the dominant style of application: the age of engagement is also the age
of business intelligence.
BI is central to engagement
Analysis of business projects across industry sectors shows that areas such as customer
insight and engagement, social business, mobile applications, marketing analytics,
case management, partner collaboration, next generation e-commerce, and e-government
are high on the list of priorities. All of these include strong aspects of engagement,
and require BI to support rapid analysis of diverse data sources (structured and
unstructured), decision making in real time, and the ability to share information
on a wider scale.
BI must therefore provide a wider range of capabilities that enable staff at every
level to apply insights from all types of interaction, structured and unstructured,
to operational, tactical and strategic business decisions. Deployment and more importantly
successful user adoption on this scale, depends on making BI a natural and integrated
part of the user workplace, and of enabling positive information behaviour within
the organisation. Self service, both of information, and the ability to manipulate
that information, increases user productivity and reduces the total cost of ownership.
A broader definition for BI
Integration is critical to this environment, because the newer systems of interaction
and engagement must be integrated into existing transactional systems, and be able
to provide a unified view to employees and to customers across both domains. The
boundaries between previously diverse categories such as data warehousing, content
management, social media, collaboration and search are becoming increasingly blurred,
and will be incorporated into a broader definition for BI.
From a technology perspective, innovation in this area has never been more active
– a sure sign that it is seen as a source of competitive advantage for users, and
of strong returns for suppliers and investors. New techniques are emerging, including
in-memory and columnar databases, and analytics and event stream processing applied
to big data sets, and there is increased interest in extended deployment models
such as mobile BI, cloud-based services and open-source solutions.
However, engagement is not primarily a technology strategy: it is about enabling
employees, customers and partners to use information more effectively as the basis
of their relationships. In this context, the new generation of business intelligence
must support all areas of the organisation with fast and actionable insight, and
a change in thinking towards a more customer-centric view to which new and existing
systems should be aligned.