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Blog: Colin White« BI Directions for 2008: Usability? | Main | New Report on Enterprise 2.0 from AIIM » 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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Comments
I've been doing data mining for years, and I feel your pain. I usually use 'analytics' to describe adding insight to numbers and producing something beyond reporting.
Posted by: Ed Freeman | March 3, 2008 12:29 PM
Colin,
While reading your blog a saying came to mind: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The last few years many terms are introduced. Mainly because specialists like to think they add something new. It's true, to BI specialist they do add something, but to most people not.
To make a term stick, I think the term must the term must be self explanatory and widely usable. So being been watered down only adds to popularity of a term.
In short, I don't think the term BI will go away because it is a understandable term for the average Joe and you can use for lots of different purposes.
Posted by: Guido | March 10, 2008 3:09 AM
The BI term is dead... I've been battling confusion stemming from the term at my organization for > 2 years and still the term comes back to haunt me. I prefer to name specific functionality whenever possible instead of broad terms. When I do have to broadly speak of olap, mining, etc I say analytics only because the term causes a bit less confusion.
Posted by: Brian | March 17, 2008 10:09 AM