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« BI Leader: BI Will Incorporate More Web 2.0, Social Networking, SOA | Main | Competing on Analytics When There's Too Much Data » August 29, 2007Will Search Change the Way We BI?
"Can search deliver on the promise of ubiquitous BI? And, if not ubiquitous BI, how or why will search change the manner in which organizations generate and consume BI?" To answer these questions, Steve Swoyer recently spoke with some leading voices in the BI space, and comes to the conclusion that the jury is still out on these questions, but search is showing potential in as a BI front-end tool. "Search vendors," he writes in a TDWI report, "cite the can’t-miss Web search model on which the technology is based and say that enterprise search has a proven usability track record." Search isn't likely to replace more established reporting, BI, and enterprise data warehouse approaches, but enhance them or fill in gaps where information is difficult to access. Jill Dyche, a partner with and co-founder of BI and DW consultancy Baseline, and one of the most respected authorities on all things BI, said that she is seeing forward-thinking companies tap search technologies to complement existing BI and data warehouse implementations. Search tools also help clear up confusion and redundancy in larger organizations, which may have thousands of documents and hundreds of database instances scattered about. Plus, there's the search appliance. Dyche is quoted as observing that "most of our clients embarking on search are using it to track and manage their reports using search appliance technology. Hyperion—now Oracle—does this very well, using a Google search appliance. By exposing the metadata from BI tools, the search appliance can find reports and other documents and make them available to anyone with Web access." Steve cites an example of search-BI query fusion: "A more advanced BI search use case involves indexing reports across multiple BI platforms." Often, end-users need to search multiple systems one at a time in an attempt to gather all relevant reports. However, Steve adds, because there are so many vendors offering so many BI platforms out there, that it may be a challenge finding a search engine that can support so many formats. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
