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BI 2.0: A sneak preview

Donning a completely new look, the next version of BI promises to deliver more in terms of features and functionality than traditional BI. By Neeraj Gandhi

Data is an integral part of the engine that drives the growth of any enterprise. Based on this, enterprises take decisions and convert plans into actions. However, if this data is not managed properly, a company’s growth tends to decelerate slowly but surely. Enterprises today are faced with a new kind of challenge, the challenge of managing information, digital information that is.

In the normal course of business, enterprises refer to recent data stored in a data warehouse to plan for the next few weeks. This involved manually hunting and analyzing data, a hectic and troublesome task. It was here that BI came to the rescue. With its tools, BI provided historical, current, and predictive views of business operations based on data stored in the data warehouse.

Over the years BI has developed and matured into an effective solution for any growing enterprise. Today, enterprises are using BI to attain business goals. Amidst all this, the next generation of BI known as BI 2.0 has been brewing for sometime now.

Defining BI 2.0

Is BI 2.0 an improvement upon traditional BI, or is it the next level, much like the Web 2.0, or a completely different platform altogether? Even vendors are looking for clarity on BI 2.0. They are however sure of the fact that BI is evolving into a more powerful tool.

John Kopcke, Oracle Senior VP, BI and Enterprise Performance Management said, “BI 2.0 marks BI becoming more interactive (not only consuming reports, queries and dashboards, but being able to find and analyze the right information), more collaborative (it offers tools to not only work with data, but work on it with others, share analyses, comment on performance indicators, and link indicators together to create causal effects between different business functions), and more personalized (BI tailored to the way how different people consume and work with information).”

Charles Nicholls’, Founder and CEO, SeeWhy Software, definition of BI 2.0 leans on Tim O’ Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0. “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to Internet as the platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” He defined BI 2.0 as “the business revolution caused by the move to service oriented architecture, which enables intelligence to be built into business processes.”

Venkatesh Anant, Director, Business Development, Intellicus Technologies said, “BI 2.0 is the next generation of BI solutions, offering real-time intelligence and enabling automated decision-making. It is a term that encapsulates several important new concepts about the way that we use and exploit information in businesses. It is also intrinsically linked with real-time and event-driven BI, but is really about the application of these technologies to business processes.”

Sanjay Deshmukh, Country Manager India/ SAARC, Business Objects said, “BI essentially means adding value to the business by effectively utilizing data. There will be no fundamental change in this definition for BI 2.0, but there would be additional features like real time data analysis in traditional BI that will shape BI 2.0.”

Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence defined BI 2.0 as “an extension of Web 2.0 in the enterprise scenario where it is an important opportunity for the user. It will be a mix and match of structured and unstructured, corporate and public data mashups in many new ways for analysis and interactive reporting capabilities.”

Inside BI 2.0

The fact is that we live in a fast paced environment, where real time, minute-by-minute news and information differentiates winners from losers. BI 2.0 offers a platform to stay ahead in this race. Contrary to traditional BI systems that are designed for querying data warehouse containing historical data, BI 2.0 systems are designed for continuous analysis of real-time event streams and complex events, and interpreting their impact.

“Traditional BI analyzes data at rest, in a database. Queries are run to extract data, calculate metrics, which can then be displayed on a dashboard, or in a report. This process is inherently retrospective where you are reporting on what happened in the past,” said Nicholls. “The main advantage is that BI 2.0 can be built into processes, whereas traditional BI merely reports on past processes,” he added.

That said, in the BI 2.0 architecture the data is analyzed in memory, continuously, and in flight. This means that data isn’t stored in a database or extracted for analysis. BI 2.0 gets data directly from middleware, the natural place to turn to for real-time data. It uses event-stream processing. This method processes streams of events in memory, either in parallel with actual business processes or as a process step itself. Therefore, it can be said that the BI 2.0 architecture is based on middleware and SOA and not on database and queries as in traditional BI.

BI 2.0 will also bridge the gap between the users and usage. Traditional BI has always remained in the hands of a few experts or senior level management within the enterprise. Contrary to this, the BI 2.0 architecture will take the application to all users in the enterprise. “This next generation of BI, BI 2.0 includes visualization capabilities that let users see the relationships among data as well as interactivity that lets them manipulate the data in an intuitive manner of working that suits the way that business users think,” added Mehta.

“In traditional BI there is a complete integrated package in which it is predictable how it can and will be used. Whereas, within BI 2.0, with that same seamless integration, users can create their own unique combination of functionalities, combining every single piece of technology that can access the data,” said Kopcke.

It should also be noted here that BI 2.0 would not turn the existing BI platform on its head, and that reports will still be needed. What BI 2.0 will do is complement the existing capabilities and extend BI’s reach into operational processes.

India’s BI quotient

According to Gartner, the level of BI adoption varies across verticals. BFSI and retail sectors are using analytics to drive competitive advantage. “Indian enterprises don’t look at BI as a means to enable MIS but embed BI in their business processes. Enterprise agility is a high-priority goal in many enterprises, but BI’s overall impact on business is poorly understood and still considered as ‘nice to have’,” said Bhavish Sood, Principal Analyst, Software Markets, Gartner Inc.

The adoption of BI till now has been driven by the overall growth of the economy. But it’s largely industry specific. “The level of adoption varies across verticals. Telecom and BFSI have taken to BI in a big way and there is approximately 90% deployment. Even ITeS and retail have started looking at BI as a possibility,” added Deshmukh.

According to Anant, globally the size of BI market is approximately $4-6 billion, which is completely dedicated to reporting/analytics. “However in India, the industry is still relatively nascent and is poised to grow to $47.4 million by 2011, as predicted by Frost and Sullivan,” he said.

From BI to BI 2.0

BI came and changed the way enterprises used data for decision-making. BI 2.0 is knocking at the door. The scenario presents a great opportunity for the enterprises. But the million-dollar question is; when would the transition happen? Some say that the transition has happened over the past one year and it is only recently that the term BI 2.0 is being recognized.

“Some organizations have been applying 2.0 principles for the last 25 years, making use of conventional technologies. Some will never reach the stage of more interaction, more collaboration and more personalized information. However, the time is ‘right’ for the transition,” said Kopcke.

According to Deshmukh, five revolutions will drive this transition. “User revolution (BI will become ubiquitous, available to each and every user in the enterprise), platform revolution (the wave of standardization where companies will streamline their set of vendors from a long list of vendors to a short list of strategic partners), network revolution (addresses the issue of accuracy of data, structuring the unstructured data and reducing duplication of data), application revolution (BI would become the integral part of the application) and community revolution (Web technologies will play a greater role in BI like SaaS, and BI will use user community feedback to improve analytic applications).” “The shift has already happened in telecom, insurance and big MNCs,” he added.

“BI will be a key enabler in building an information-oriented culture within an enterprise, and should be an important deployment priority. But Indian enterprises should not confuse BI technology selection as the end goal of a BI initiative,” added Sood.

That said, leveraging BI 2.0 to the benefit of the enterprise will require a certain level of homogeneity and well be defined by needs and framework.

neeraj.gandhi@expressindia.com