Will BI 2.0 drive business insight?

It was probably inevitable that the advent of Web 2.0 would lead to a flurry of ‘2.0' coinages. One such is ‘business intelligence 2.0' as a term denoting a set of new business intelligence (BI) approaches and technologies. But is it just another piece of PR branding, or does it bear a real relationship to developments in the way BI systems are designed and used?

There has certainly been a change in thinking about what business intelligence can, or should, offer the enterprise. In the modern organisation, the development of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has made it easier to link lots of data sources together so that information flows freely between them in real time. Organisations increasingly share data with customers and suppliers and the organisational structure is less hierarchical with -decision-making more widely dispersed.

CIOs recognise the potential BI offers for making the business more profitable. A Gartner survey has found that it is top of CIOs' list of technology priorities for 2009 but, against that, the recent past has been littered with failed BI implementations.

Some would argue that the traditional model of BI, in which data is extracted from databases, loaded into a data warehouse and then, days later, turned into reports for executives to study, is not up to the job of providing the kind of information needed to make decisions in the fast-moving, inter-connected modern world. The central question that the term ‘BI 2.0' is trying to address is: how can we use data in a way that leads to better decision-making?

A large part of the answer is that we need to push information out to a much wider group of people, and not just senior managers. "If you take a step back from the technology and look at how people and organisations work, there are overlapping areas of expertise," says Richard Neale, product marketing director of SAP Business-Objects.

"It's a very complex web. BI 2.0 should be about developing BI to support this decision-making process, break down barriers between departments and people and get them to work together."

Frank Buytendijk, vice president for enterprise performance management at Oracle, agrees. He argues that the new model of the enterprise - "Enterprise 2.0", naturally - is more networked and less hierarchical. "Traditional BI tends to be aimed at organisational hierarchy," he says. "You have to have a 2.0 approach, otherwise the way you manage that business doesn't match the way the business model works. Decision-making processes can be more participative."

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