Rich Internet Applications: The World Wide Web is making the consumer a powerful change agent. Consumer-facing applications are the driving force behind the pressure put on businesses that sell products/services on the Web. If the businesses don’t provide what the consumers expect, the consumers will go elsewhere to buy the goods and services. The consumer can customize products and orders and can read pages of books before buying them. If they are not satisfied, the consumer can move from one business to another with a click of the mouse.

This amazing consumer power mandates that the applications on the Web have dynamic content with rich visualization and extreme interactivity. In short, these applications have to be rich in all these capabilities. Let’s appropriately call them rich Internet applications (RIAs).

RIAs are web applications that have some of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of an Ajax framework, proprietary software, web browser, plug-ins and advanced Javascript compiler technology.

Once people become accustomed to the consumer-facing RIAs in business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions, they expect the same everywhere. These RIA expectations translate to interactions between businesses (business-to-business, or B2B) and employer/employee interactions (business-to-employee, or B2E).

Providing dynamic, interactive access with rich visualization and RIAs, B2C, B2B and B2E applications will require a robust back-end server with comprehensive access to disparate data, scalability to support millions of people, reliability, security features and improved performance to provide all of this in a matter of seconds. This development is driving the BI future – no matter what we call BI! And on top of it, “democratization of computing” is arriving on tip toe in the form of open source!

Open source: Open source software (OSS) is defined as computer software for which the source code and certain other rights, normally reserved for copyright holders and provided under a software license, is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source almost represents the spirit of “democratization of software access and development.”

One of the prominent development platforms for open source is Eclipse. More and more organizations throughout the world are looking to get involved in development and use of open source software. And they are not doing it only for the new applications, but also to replace the existing applications as the need arises. Not only is open source considered for new and to-be-replaced applications, but more and more for BI applications and reporting. And the majority of people in the organizations feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors. More (curiously, they happen to be younger) people are getting involved in the implementation of open source because of minimal cost involved,  and they are using more and more mobile technology, creating need for mobile computing.

Mobile computing: Wireless computing has started to become as ubiquitous as the cell phones – and across the entire world! Wireless data access, including WiFi, is gradually becoming very popular; but as with cell phone networks, there will always be some geographic gaps in service. The difference is that while telephone service is necessarily synchronous (for the most part, voicemail notwithstanding), computer applications need not be. They can be asynchronous. Applications are evolving in order to support the mobilized workplace and lifestyle so that when users lose connectivity, they can still keep working. Mobile computing represents one’s ability to use technology while moving, as opposed to portable computers, which are only practical for use while deployed in a stationary configuration. Mobile computing in the form of banking or checking the status of packages is becoming the norm of today’s mobile workforce. Since the Internet has taken the entire world by storm, Internet-based software is, by default, becoming more and more desirable. On top of that the model becoming more and more popular is software as a service (SaaS) in the Internet world.

Cloud computing: The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet as it is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure that is lying underneath – SaaS (software as a service) and grid computing. It combines the concepts of content management, virtualization, collocation and outsourced web hosting to form a concept called "cloud computing." Enabling factors include extreme broadband and wireless Internet access. Examples of companies using cloud computing extensively are Amazon, Yahoo and Google, just to name a few.

Content management: A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text. In order to provide various features necessary for the BI systems of today and tomorrow, CMSs have to support various types of media available today and types that will possibly be coming in the future. On top of it, the authors creating the “content” don’t need to know where the contents are located. These contents are providing service to the users at large.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA): Business intelligence is supposed to enable user self-sufficiency by providing interactive content through a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes. An SOA separates functions into distinct units (services), which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create business applications. These services communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services. SOA concepts are often seen as built upon older concepts of distributed computing and modular programming. This is called virtualization of IT resources.

In the virtualization of IT resources, the customers, employees or suppliers don’t need to know what is where as long as they have quick access to it, preferably via the Internet. The data is becoming a commodity because of the tools that are used to access it. It is affordable for people to buy computers – quality laptops are cheap, storage in gigabytes is not expensive and Internet access providers are vying to get customers by supplying high-speed bandwidth for pennies. People receive approximately the same quality of hardware and Internet access independent of which vendor they select. That is commoditization – delivering solutions to thousands and thousands of consumers!

With the use of SOAs, business intelligence has to support dashboards, spreadsheets and predictive analytics – as well as anything and everything that will help people make better decisions faster. But so far, with its B2E applications, BI has catered only to a limited group of users, known as power users. BI has to look beyond the power users. But what does BI need to be equipped with in order to address the needs of thousands of other users within organizations? Scalability! Scalability is also a must for the use of the technology by thousands upon thousands of the consumers with B2C applications. In order to have this massive scalability, it is important to realize that one can’t do everything. Some aspects of BI computing have to be outsourced! “Divide and conquer” applies in effective computing.

Business process outsourcing: Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a form of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of specific business functions (or processes) to a third-party service provider. Originally, this was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca Cola, which outsourced large segments of its supply chain. In the contemporary context, it is primarily used to refer to the outsourcing of services.

BPO is typically categorized into back-office outsourcing (which includes internal business functions such as human resources or bookkeeping and accounting) and front office outsourcing (which includes customer-related services such as contact center services). Anyone calling the toll-free numbers at night realizes that they are speaking with an individual who is located 10,000 miles away with bright sunshine pouring through the windows!

With all of this, one question that needs to be asked is: Is all data that we are asking for neatly stored in rows and columns? The answer is unequivocally “no” – the world of data is not necessarily so neat! It is not necessarily that structured! Structured data is only tip of the iceberg! A major chunk, possibly 80%, is in unstructured format – far away from the neat rows and columns. And there are nuggets of information hiding that must be detected by the BI applications – that is unstructured data.

Unstructured data: The management of unstructured data is recognized as one of the major unsolved problems in the information technology industry. The main reason for this is that the tools and techniques that have proved so successful in transforming structured data into actionable information simply do not work when it comes to unstructured data.

I have written numerous articles on unstructured data that cover the topic in more detail. To read these pieces, please click here.