Blog: Colin White

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February 29, 2008

Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?

Several times over the past few weeks discussions about the relationship between business analytics and business intelligence has led to some interesting conclusions. Three specific occasions spring to mind – when judging the 2008 SIIA CODiE Awards for Business Intelligence, while working with Judy Davis on a BI Network research report on embedded analytics, and at a recent SAS analyst conference.

During interviews, business users always seem comfortable with the term business analytics, but often view BI as a vague and imprecise technical term. Some vendors and IT folks also seem to prefer business analytics to BI. In the area of operational BI, for example, new solutions are appearing on the market that employ embedded or stream analytics. These solutions often use data from sources other than a data warehouse. The vendor concern here is that BI and data warehousing are often seen as being tightly linked and one cannot occur without the other. The term operational analytics is sometimes preferred because it is viewed as being more dynamic than operational BI.

At last week’s SAS conference, CEO Jim Goodnight commented that business intelligence has been watered down by competitors such as Business Objects and Cognos, whose query and reporting tools couldn’t approach the sophistication of the advanced analytics produced by SAS products.

What do you think? Has the term business intelligence become so abused that it is now confusing and meaningless?

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