Enterprise applications Toolkit

Reaping business intelligence's harvest

David Braue ZDNet Australia

Published: 05 Jan 2004 11:59 GMT

In other words, BAM is the life force of the business intelligence network. Inventory levels, for example, will be available in real time outside of the warehouse alongside orders and sales data; metrics like customer satisfaction, cash on hand, online experience, and on-time delivery will be tied to real financial results; and so on.

By straddling the business and technology areas, BAM becomes a catalyst for turning BI analytics into real business process change. The BICC is the heart of the system, BIN the arteries, BAM the muscles -- and people, the brain.

BI's big future
After a quite ordinary 2002, the BI market heated up a bit during 2003, as vendors alternatively acquired and built new technologies pushing their technologies into new areas like collaboration and complex analytics. Rampant consolidation has narrowed the field considerably: Gartner's August 2003 Magic Quadrant industry snapshot identified just four leaders in the BI suite market -- Cognos, Business Objects, Information Builders, Crystal Decisions (since purchased by Business Objects) -- and only seven other companies in various stages of market maturity.

This consolidation makes choosing a BI platform a much easier proposition for customers, who will find today's offerings richer and more capable than those that came before. Given the breadth of functionality in today's BI suites, it should be easier than ever for companies to tie their reporting, query and analytical capabilities into the broader enterprise context of the business intelligence network.

IDC is forecasting continuing strong growth for the BI sector, predicting that Asia-Pacific BI revenues will grow at 12.2 percent annually from $588.1m (£328.7m) in 2002, to over $1bn by 2007. This reflects continuing strong adoption of BI solutions, with many companies strengthening their investments after enjoying success with first-generation deployments.

Ultimately, the BIN will be so well entrenched within company strategy that it becomes virtually invisible to users. Some vendors have already pushed in that direction: Alphablox, for example, has enjoyed strong success with one Australian telecommunications company where its eponymous BI analytics framework has taken on a life of its own -- spreading across 18 applications and thousands of users -- as it progressively proves its value.

The key to that growth has been Alphablox's strategy of providing a BI framework that's buried within internal business applications, says Elisabeth Whitelock, the company's sales and marketing director.

"Our approach is to personalise it to the individual level so the experience they have is very specific to them, their role and the level of information they're entitled to access," she says. "It's going to be really difficult for people to say that they should only use one thing enterprise-wide, and I'm not necessarily convinced that one size fits all. But customers have a bigger view of where they want to take things, and a vision that this sort of technology can fulfil many [needs] across the organisation."

By building the BICC as a business abstraction layer and the BIN as a BI technological abstraction layer, companies will be able to progressively increase their use of business information of all kinds. By 2006, Gartner believes the stratification of BI architectures will allow users in different departments to work on the same models simultaneously, or to have multiple BI applications communicating seamlessly.

Whether the concept is right for your business depends, well, on your business. But as increasing numbers of corporate information users come to see BI as a tool for analysing information -- rather than an oracle for simply being given the answers -- there is no limit to the change that good intelligence can bring.