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The Future of BI:
Are dashboards pointing the way?
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At a recent summit of Business Intelligence experts, hosted
by Dashboard Insight, one of the questions posed to the panel I was sitting on
was "Whither BI, what is the future of BI?" This is a question that has been
steadily plaguing me over the past several years, and one of the reasons why I
had consciously started to focus my attention on the dashboard side of the
business. After engaging in many well intentioned and executed BI projects that
yielded mediocre results at best, I started to wonder "Is BI broken? Is there a
better way?" At the time, I saw a focus on dashboards solving many of the
inherent problems that I had recognized in the traditional approach to BI,
because a greater emphasis was put on solving user problems versus data ones.
Over the course of delivering nearly a hundred unique dashboard solutions I came
to adopt what I refer to as a user-centric approach to business intelligence
design. Some people also refer to this as a top-down approach, which lies in
stark contrast to the traditional bottom-up or data-centric approach used today
in most significant business intelligence projects.
How we got to where we are:
At this point it might be helpful to talk a bit about the history of BI and
the shifting user base it has been designed to target. The bottom-up
(data-centric) approach to BI started with the inception of BI as a practice,
when the primary goal of business intelligence was solving the engineering and
architectural challenges of integrating and reporting against a companies
internal data that was often siloed in a few large data repositories that were
generated by companies’ various critical business software such as the
accounting, sales, and inventory systems. The focus of these efforts was
creating data structures that data analysts could do rudimentary reporting on
and analytics against, so when business users needed answers to questions like
"what are our top 10 selling products versus our top 10 most profitable
products" the data analysts could design reports that tied together the
accounting data with sales and inventory data. The primary users of these
systems were trained data analysts that served as a human bridge between the
business users and the specialized tools designed to access the back end BI
systems.
In an effort to create reporting systems that gave a small specialized group of
data analysts the ability to generate a myriad of reports for a diverse set of
business needs, the focus was on designing highly flexibly systems that
anticipated a wide array of abstract business requirements. The BI industry
responded accordingly by developing the necessary tooling to extract, transform,
process, organize, and analyze this raw data by transforming it into abstract
data structures, and thus we saw the emergence of ETL tools, Data Warehouses,
OLAP cubes, as well as many other specialized technologies. Up to this point,
the innovation in BI was really focused on how data was managed and manipulated.
Technologies were invented and methodologies developed and espoused, in some
cases with an almost religious fervor. But in this early period of BI, during
the emergence and development of BI as a discipline, one key ingredient was
conspicuously missing: the end-user who was the ultimate beneficiary of this
"intelligence."
Where we are today:
Cut to today, and we find ourselves in a surprisingly different environment.
Business and technology have been radically altered in many unexpected and
significant ways through humanity's adoption of the internet during the mid to
late 1990's. We now find ourselves in a highly dynamic and connected environment
where business moves at a much faster pace, requiring that decisions be made
faster and with more accuracy. We also are faced with an exponential growth in
the volume of data we produce, collect, analyze and are forced to interact with.
Not only has the amount of data grown significantly, it is also far more
distributed and heterogeneous than it ever was. Companies no longer have their
critical business data stored in just a few large systems, but they also receive
important business data from many ever-changing outside sources over which the
company may have little or no control.
As BI has evolved over the past twenty years and has tried to keep pace with
these ever more complex set of business and technology conditions, there has
been more and more attention on enabling business users with direct access to
these business intelligence tools. The first of these end user tools came in the
form of static or canned reports that users could access directly. These were
followed by the invention of "ad hoc" reports that gave users WYSIWYG tools to
create their own reports against pre-determined data structures. We now have
progressed to easy-to-understand, highly visual and dynamic dashboard displays.
The phrase "BI for the masses" has come into vogue over the past couple of
years, but unfortunately BI as an industry is still correctly perceived by the
business community as having very little success in achieving this vision. BI
tools are still considered too hard to use, taking too long to implement, and
costing too much. Why is this?
Obviously there are real technology and business process challenges that we must
overcome to accommodate the volume and pace of data generated by our
internetenabled global economy and business conditions, but I believe the
primary challenge we are facing is the BI industry itself. At the risk of being
lambasted by the cadre of established industry gurus, I would like to posit the
thesis that the large BI companies and the recognized "experts" are actually
hindering the very innovation and processes that would most benefit business and
increase the efficacy of these tools. I make this statement because I believe
too much of the focus is still being placed on collecting, manipulating and
managing data when the focus should really be put on how users interact with the
data, and what business conditions they are trying to improve via this
interaction.
Does the BI Industry have it all wrong?
Big BI (defined by the small group of large but influential BI technology
companies that we all know) has painted itself into a corner from which it is
very difficult to escape. As a result, they are slowing down innovation and,
more importantly, the processes used to implement true business intelligence.
The mature and established BI players have built their fortunes on developing
and selling large data-centric tools, applications, and services to the
enterprise. In lock-step with Big BI, the professional service providers and
resulting industry experts have all developed methodologies and approaches they
espouse and use to implement these technologies. Both the BI companies and the
solution providers have a vested economic interest in continuing to see these
technologies and approaches purchased and implemented. So what happens when we
start to question how effective these technologies and approaches truly are to
actually helping businesses? And, even worse, what if we conclude that they are
no longer (or never were) optimal solutions to truly address the business
problems we were trying to solve?
Let me illustrate this problem with a concrete example that has become painfully
obvious with the popularity of dashboard technologies. Dashboards are probably
the first true end-user tool that can effectively deliver business intelligence
data to every user within the organization with very little friction and low to
no training costs. Done correctly, dashboards can be very effective business
intelligence tools. Done incorrectly they can be little more than superficial
window dressing. But the epiphany I came to a few years ago, is that you can
build a highly effective and maintainable dashboard solution with a very simple
BI infrastructure. You do not need a data warehouse; you do not need an OLAP
cube or a sophisticated ETL process. This is not to say that these technologies
are not immensely helpful and in some cases even necessary, but in almost every
case they are the exact wrong place to start for a company or department
pursuing its first BI initiative. I can almost guarantee you will never hear
this from any person trying to sell you a BI solution. Why is that?
If the bread-and-butter of your revenue stream and expertise is selling large
and complex BI systems and services that focus on the complex issues of data
integration and dissemination, do you start telling your prospects that these
systems and services are not really the right place to start, especially if your
product line blindly assumes these pieces are necessary? This is exactly what is
happening today, although I do think it is starting to change. s
If a business tries to purchase any of the top-tier dashboard solutions from any
of the major BI vendors, they will be told that first they must implement the
rest of their "stack" which will consist of myriad back-end data-centric tools
that will enable the dashboard. While the BI vendors know that all or even a
fraction of the functionality in the rest of the back-end stack may not be
needed, they cannot tell you that. If they did, how would they explain this to
all of their current customers who were told these significant investments were
required to produce an effective dashboard? What would the impact be to their
revenue stream when they suddenly told prospects that they no longer need the
most expensive and profitable products and instead could purchase what was being
sold as the sizzle as opposed to the steak? This same conundrum holds true for
most of the industry experts who have built their careers on developing and
evangelizing rigorous disciplines and techniques to build these data Taj Mahals.
What do they do now? Say "Oops--sorry we were wrong-- all that stuff we told you
to do for the past 15 years is really not the most effective approach--we got it
backwards."
Are Dashboards pointing the way to the future of BI?
In realizing that we really need to start top down and make the focus about
the user and not the data, what has become evident to me is that dashboards,
more than anything else in BI today, are the most effective tools for validating
your user's needs. Unlike written specifications, data diagrams, and other
typical requirement artifacts, dashboards provide users something they can touch
and play with and let you know immediately if you are on or off track in meeting
their needs. When executed properly, dashboards become the meeting ground
between company strategy and company execution. Because (good) dashboards are
designed to be intuitive and highly focused, they force a lot of critical issues
to the surface and require the business to ask questions like "Why is this
important to us? What problems does it help us solve?" Additionally, on the back
end, dashboards help to clearly answer the engineering questions of what data is
really needed to support users, where the data is to come from and at what
frequency, as well as the most appropriate abstract structures to organize the
data by.
For these reasons I strongly advocate that clients embarking on any business
intelligence project either large or small start with their dashboard and/or
report design first. Before worrying about what data exists and what format it
is in (and even worse having your design influenced by what data does NOT exist)
define the project in terms of the user interface that will be used to meet the
business requirements for the people actually using the solution, as opposed to
the engineers building it. With smaller sets of relevant sample data and user
requirements focused on solving the true needs of the business community, the
initial dashboard prototypes can be used as a tool to not only provide some
immediate user utility, but also as a set of very specific business and
technology requirements for larger back-end BI initiatives. One of the reasons
that this technique is so effective, is that it provides the ability to iterate
and test assumptions with the user community with significantly less cost and
time than it takes using a bottom up approach. It takes days or, worst case,
weeks to prototype a dashboard, while it takes months or even years to create an
integrated data warehouse.
Where are we headed?
So where does that leave us today, and what does this all mean for the
future of BI? I think dashboards represent just the first step for the next
major phase in BI both from a technology and a methodology perspective. For the
lack of a better term I will label this next phase, the "BI user experience" as
represented by user interfaces that information workers and business executives
interact with to "experience" their data. Notice how I use the term "experience"
versus analyze or view. Think of the difference of looking at a picture of an
airplane versus reading a written description of one. In the first instance you
have an instantaneous recognition of this visual symbol and its meaning, in the
second instance it may take several seconds or more for you to understand what
is being represented through written language. Processing of visual imagery
leverages a completely different part of the human brain than reading the
written word. Unlike the written word, which is processed through our
pre-frontal cortex and language centers in a linear fashion, visual images are
processed in a much deeper and more fundemental part of our brain in parallel.
This is an extremely important point and cannot be understated. Take a look at a
long column or row of sales numbers in Excel and then look at those same numbers
in a bar chart. Your ability to process that information and the inherent
relationships within that data is exponentially higher and faster with the bar
chart. This is one area where the human brain still far exceeds the power of
technology-driven computation in its ability to recognize and process patterns
composed of large volumes of information.
As an example of where I see the potential future of BI, I would like to draw a
parallel to what is becoming a ubiquitous and re-evolutionary product, the
iPhone. The iPhone does not provide any functionality that dozens of other smart
phones were not offering before, and in many cases it provides less. But talk to
any iPhone user and you will sense an almost evangelistic zeal in their voice
when they describe it to you. What the iPhone does amazingly well is take all of
that smart phone functionality, which on many other devices is perceived as too
complex or burdensome to use, and literally puts it at your fingertips. By
creating a feedback loop between two parallel processed sensory mechanisms
(vision and touch) combined with a very well thought out design, Apple has made
what was once a complex user interaction incredibly simple and intuitive. I
believe the same can be done for business intelligence as well as data analysis,
where deep and complex data sets can be presented and interacted with in ways
that are tailored to specific business functions and conditions and provide end
users powerful and intuitive interfaces. At a minimum, with a little innovation
we should be able to take data visualization and user interaction techniques
that are used in other current technologies (such as video games) and combine
them in a way that allows us to see the same data we are looking at today in
more intuitive and relevant ways.
I see dashboards, especially interactive dashboards, and the technology they are
built upon as the first step in this next phase of BI. While we still have many
challenges to solve on the back end with the exponential growth in volume,
diversity, and distribution of data sources, I see the real innovation occurring
on the front end in both user interface design and user experience through
innovation of user interaction techniques and business methodologies. I think
the sooner the BI industry is able to re-align its focus (a.k.a. revenue
streams) on these new areas of innovation instead of clinging to the solutions
and methodologies that were designed for conditions and technologies that
existed 5, 10, and even 15 years ago the more the BI industry and the businesses
it serves will prosper.
About Thomas W. Gonzalez:
Mr. Gonzalez is the founder and Managing Director of BrightPoint Consulting,
Inc.
BrightPoint Consulting, Inc is a next generation business
intelligence services firm that delivers corporate dashboard and advanced
information visualization solutions to organizations across the world.
BrightPoint Consulting leverages best of breed technologies in data
visualization, business intelligence and application integration to deliver
powerful dashboard and business performance solutions that allow executives and
managers to monitor and manage their business with precision and agility. For
further company information, visit BrightPoint’s Web site at
www.brightpointinc.com.
Copyright © 2005-2008 BrightPoint Consulting, Inc.
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