Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Wired for BI

The July issue of Wired Magazine contained a list of the Wired 40 companies. To be wired implied a "hunger for new ideas and an impatience to put them into practice", along with strategic vision, global reach, and killer technology. The list started with Google, Apple, Samsung, Genentech, Yahoo, Amazon, Toyota, General Electric, News Corp, SAP, and others.

I had to scratch my head a bit to understand why these companies and not some others. Several seem obvious in our interconnected age, like Google and Amazon. But, why was Toyota and General Electric included? Why was UPS not included?

The secret to their wired madness comes from six trends that they feel are driving the global economy:

- People Power - shift of media power from few established channels to an open peer-to-peer interactions among millions of persons. The example of News Corp recently acquisition of MySpace (with its 40 million participants) was citied as the new style of peer production of mass media.

- Video Unlimited - Always on at any time, place and format. An example was the video iPod from Apple.

- Personalize It - Perfect fit to uniquely you of jeans, drugs, music and all other consumer items. An example was Netflix with its individualized recommendations.

- Carbon Killers - Green is in! Companies are charging ahead into a future where carbon emissions and energy consumption are constrained.

- Buy It Now - Acquire innovation by purchasing startup companies who have the edge on key ideas. An example was eBay's acquisition of Skype in voice-over-IP telephony

- All-Access Economy - Open standards not just for infrastructure components like operating systems (Linux), but also open access to thousands of custom services for individuals and companies. An example was Salesforce.com expansion into 2,000 on-demand applications from purchasing to recruiting.

So, how does this all relate to BI? Note that none of the above would be possible without… The integration of data into a consistent view of reality combined with analytics that surface the important relationships and trends within the data. Sounds like BI is an essential enabling ingredient for all of these global wired trends.

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