The future of BI

In the last months I have had the opportunity of analyzing in depth three excelent solutions in Business Intelligence: Microstrategy, Qlik and Sisense; All of them are very useful apps, I think also that they are moving in the right path, and are able to cover customer's different profiles.

Business Intelligence's applications are amazingly simple and quick in connecting to different data sources, (e.g. ERP’s or accountancy software, but also from Internet, excel o txt files, or almost any other source). On the other hand, BI's application allows covering two different costumer types:

- One more classic that we may call "Corporate"; This one answers to the needs defined by the management of the company.

- And the most brand new path and that I want to be developed much more in Spain, called “Discovery” and which I like to call "Creative"; in this one freedom is granted to the final users "to "play" (without any risk) with the database information, connecting to others files or databases, and easily extracting, correlating, analyzing and evaluating data.

We may use this “Creative” applications to review our assumptions, detecting hidden correlations, evaluate risky ideas and alternative business plans, or just backing our projects; In summary, helping first ourselves in being more effective and efficient professionals and second helping our company to achieve its objectives.

There is still a debate going on about the risks and convenience of this "Creative" part:

- would it turn aside the attention of the objectives of the company?

- would the profusion of information with professional appearance to generate confusion and to prevent effective management?

Actually it is true that is not yet easy to find qualified staff being able to “squeeze” the data in a proper way, but this will change very fast: the new generations of data scientists arriving to the market in the next years will increase the number of users demanding access to these applications. Also, companies like "Cognos" are exploring a kind of "artificial intelligence" enabling the BI application to suggest correlations and solutions based on the data and making easier for non qualified users to enjoy the BI.

I think that in spite of the actual doubts, the success of the BI applications will come thanks to this "Creative" part. To solve the question of confusion and lack of control it would be enough to “signing” somehow the "Corporate" reports (e.g. including some mark hard to replicate or by electronic signature); In the years coming, a niche of market might exist for small software companies that can associate with the big players to develop specific and personalized applications. It is amazing to imagine the potential of the improvements that would generate this growing number of new and specialized data scientists.

“The inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

Paul Ruiz Picasso.