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August 27, 2007

BI Leader: BI Will Incorporate More Web 2.0, Social Networking, SOA
Business intelligence interfaces will borrow more form and function from the consumer space, and as a result, be simpler to use while delivering more sophisticated results.

That's the view of Don Campbell, vice president of product innovation and technology at Cognos. One of my colleagues over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan, just reported on a chat he had with Campbell, who talked about the changing face of business intelligence.

“The technology at home is creeping into the enterprise,” Campbell said. "At home we all Google to find information.
At work we have no idea where things are." Increased simplicity in BI interfaces will help move it out to a larger base of users, beyond analysts and numbers wonks. For many employees, BI will run, unseen, in the background of applications, Or it may be a simple search result, or as part of a social networking experience.

To emphasize this point, Larry Dignan observes that Cognos has been hooking into search providers such as Google, Yahoo, Autonomy, Fast and IBM. "Under this concept, BI data would surface through a simple text box. You type in third quarter revenue and you’d get a chart, just like Yahoo or Google gives you the weather. Search on 'raincoats in Milan' and BI should return product specific sales by region via a simple search box."

SOA is also a trend reshaping BI systems, Campbell said. Cognos' latest platform, Cognos 8, ditched a legacy
infrastructure in favor of a service oriented architecture. As a result, Cognos can now tap into various systems–an important point given the company is agnostic when it comes to enterprise applications. Cognos can also use SOA to tack on new features. “Our footprint is much smaller now,” Campbell said.

What's next for BI systems? GPS is one exciting area of application, Campbell said. The other is "learning from the user:" Campbell says the next challenge for BI tools is learning from users, noting that today's BI tools "spit out information without much input from users." In the future, he said, BI systems will incorporate user tags and commentary. “The next generation of BI will be more comfortable understanding unstructured data,” he said. “Unstructured data will be as important as structured data.”

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