Some Thinking about BI This Week

So I've been thinking a little more about the future of BI - the mid-term future. Of course I'm at a disadvantage because I haven't had the luxury to be at the latest trade shows or to talk to product managers or sales directors for a few months in the Oracle world. But ideas move fast, products move slow, so I can't be too far off. Here are some of my fast moving ideas.

Oracle has an entire business unit doing hosted apps, and hosted BI is just a step away. We could be very close to that. But what Google is doing is completely different from what IT is thinking. Still, I think we old school database people have to very seriously consider what Web development has done to leapfrog typical database tech in corporate IT. Corporate IT has no idea what kinds of crises they are going to face in 5 years as Salesforce and SAAS gets smarter. They may be reduced to security wonks and the guys rolling PCs around on carts. Definitely check out http://highscalability.com/

What Google is doing is interesting - I'm signed up for their apps thing, but haven't got the full invite yet. I'm thinking that Ray Ozzie's stuff in Office is going to take 4 more years to be as good as it was in Groove three years ago. So Google will have a practical headstart in collaborative stuff that scales. I've heard rumors that they might be interested in Basecamp. Mac is a big winner five years out because they will do a better job on UI in a ubiquitous web services world.

Let's stop at the corner of Mac street and BI Avenue. Why has the Mac not done well in business? Because Apple didn't know database and didn't do SQL. With so much of the customer facing applications in the thin client, there's some reason to head Mac's way, but not for the mainstream user. But what about the iPhone, and what about widgets? The mobile platform, especially multitouch is very tempting, and barriers to development are basically just cultural right now. Why shouldn't I have BI or EPM alerts on my iPhone? Why indeed.

Enterprise apps will get tighter and tighter on workflow until they squeeze all the brains out of it. IE consulting companies and apps companies like Oracle and SAP will continue to out-think corporate bosses and will develop more all-encompassing frameworks for intelligent workers. Employees will be more certified to run their workstations than to know what they're actually doing.

It's getting to a point at which custom applications delivery is getting more and more sophisticated and that developers like myself will be moving more massive containers and application frameworks than ever. It's certainly true that the major Hyperion consulting partners have specialized infrastructure guys just to do installs and certs on installs and these guys are up to their eyeballs in work. Migrations were a big issue at the recent Oracle conference - lifecycle management is the key word.

I'm interested in the progress of workflow management integration and quick, lightweight tools that can be as smart as blogs, but not as heavy and more special purposed than Twitter. Not to dog the Upstream guys, but there has got to be a cheaper way to work reconciliations through the data supply chain. I think Stowe Boyd may be on to something.

It is part of my natural curiosity to see how social software works (or could be made to work) in decision support frameworks. BI is just a small part of knowledge management and sure we're all close to the zeroes and dollars, but those are awfully lightweight data streams to move. It is astounding how isolated they can be and how little there is in the way of supporting the social aspects of the EPM cycle.

In case you haven't noticed, I've added KPI Library to the blogroll. This is the beginning of open sourcing BI and best practices. It can be as disrupting as blogs have been to customer service. OBIEE has a huge library of prefab analytics, it's can't be long until every department head everywhere comes to recognize the metrics that govern his department's value. The more well understood these frameworks for EPM become, the more simple BI will simply not do.