From China Business Intelligent Network http://www.chinabi.net 有 有 Translated from DMREVIEW, please keep
Obviously, business intelligence is very promising, which can be explained by a simple fact: more and more organizations begin to expand business intelligence applications, or at least considered. According to Meta Group, the business intelligence software market increases by 10% -15 ¥ annually. To understand and identify today's BI technology trends, write down this paper, hoping to help understand the influencing factors of BI and the understanding of the organization.
Impact of BI
Although the economically significant growth in the last 12 months, the first three years of economic downturn affected BI software vendors to pay attention to customer groups and affect their product development. Prior to 2000, the organization wanted to create value or solve the problem to buy BI software, and later started the economic downturn. Fortunately, BI is one of the few departments that have not experienced sales atrophy. However, potential buyers want to understand the relevant benefits to get a larger return on investment, and reduce the total cost of ownership of the BI solution, directly leading to the growth of sales cycles. So BI software vendors face more challenges and assessing their products in the sales process requires greater energy.
Longer sales cycles and limited available capital have an important impact on many BI software vendors' financial capital. Now there is no product to occupy the monopoly of the market, which is left to users. In this case, regardless of the big or small BI software vendors have the opportunity to win the market share. The competitive environment causes BI software vendors to reflect on their market positioning and future prospects. The electronic watchmaking software market is an example, and BI vendors should learn from middle school. In the 1980s, users have a number of electronic watchmaking software to choose. With the advancement of technology and large manufacturers, such as IBM and Microsoft enters this market, the number of electronic tabulation software is rapidly reduced, and Microsoft's Excel occupies The status of the rule, and his dominance has been maintained until now.
The BI application software market is like spreadsheet software in the 1980s, is still divided by a large number of vendors - and some manufacturers have an opportunity to develop industrial standards. BI software vendors hope to develop manufacturers who dominate the dominance in this field, so they lead to mergers, like Bo gets Crystal Decisions, Hyperion gets Brio, these two major transactions are all occurred in the past year. Help these companies enhance their product suite. These merges also reflect the gradual maturity and stability of the industry, but also reflects the application of BI technology still has great growth potential. After all, BI has been deeply rooted in some companies, and does not need to sell concepts to all customers.
With the trend of standardization of BI tools, a series of market merges. In other words, BI vendors are trying to bundle more features in their product suite, hoping to choose as standard options.
The development direction of BI has been transferred in recent years. The previous economic is not booming, many BI software vendors have started the development of new products with their dreams: in the mobile BI, large-scale data mining, analysis and application packages, "If you develop, they will buy" Views are obvious.
The development of this product is dependent on the level of acceptance, and now it has been guided by the manufacturer to the customer guidance. Commercial case replaces the commitment to create value and solving problems, which clearly indicate the benefits of enterprises. Unlike the previous, it is now a customer to promote the development direction of BI technology. Mature BI Software Manufacturers understand this change, focusing on providing comprehensive query, reports, and analytics capabilities, with existing infrastructure well integrated.
International legal bodies also affect the BI market to help BI technology create demand. In recent years, some legal provisions require high-level managers and their companies to provide more reports on business monitoring, external environments, and security protection for data. Some industry standards involve specific industries, such as 1996 Mobile Health Insurance and Responsibility Behavior (HIPAA), which protects the safety of patient privacy and recording. HiPAA has four main purposes to ensure mobile health insurance, not relying on existing medical conditions related to work; reduce the spoofing and abuse of health insurance; strengthen the standardization of health information; to ensure the privacy of health information. The US bill directly affects the drug health industry. The bank securities industry has also been affected by the Basel II capital agreement, which is composed of international bank monitors. Its goal is to develop the consistency of international capital norms. In large, international, main banking institutions, the adjustment of capital is more sensitive to risk management, and improve risk management. There are also some regulations, such as 2002 search and rescue equipment regulations, directly affect the company's transactions, do not consider the industrial status, this regulation is to consolidate the confidence of the American public. These legislation and international practices are only some examples of countless regulations, and the company's managers must follow. All of these systems serve specific purposes, their public is: management and reporting information needs.
These influence have created stronger information awareness and huge information value, which in turn also promoted the demand for BI technology. Therefore, each organization faces your own specific information challenges.
Organized learning
The economic downturn in recent period has exposed the problem of business model, as well as policies, processes, and budget issues. In addition, the dawn of the downturn comes from information needs. Each manager is focused on assessing and assessing their organizations, and an important part of making savvy decisions is related, real-time and precise data for you. Those managed teams are committed to solving the defects and deficiencies of the organization. It can make sensible changes, spend the economic downturn, re-organizing the organization's positioning, and success in the economy. These induce organizations to improve their information systems to monitor, report, analyze, and make decisions.
However, the technology itself is not to solve the business itself or the answer to the government regulation. There is no demand and purpose, the era of purchasing software has passed, more than this, the purchase of excess permits or the era of software products has passed. The excessive budget at that time offset the economic downturn.
Some organizations recognize that in order to solve business problems, it is necessary to understand business issues, process and current information infrastructure, and the ability to organize new technologies should also take into account. When trying to turn from a manually generated report to the information portal, it will encounter important challenges to leaving management changes, because management changes provide incentive mechanisms to make staff support new practices, processes, and technologies.
However, quickly develop and understand BI information solutions, and adapt to changes, there is an innate difficulty for individuals, unless he has the necessary technical background and business mind. If you have no experience or skills, it is very difficult to learn, and you need more time to learn the right knowledge.
However, the development of spreadsheets also shows that the maturity of the BI environment is not based on management reforms and personal acceptance. James Cates, The Ladder Of Business Intelligence (Lobi) The author of Framework defines the level and personal acceptance of the organization application BI. Lobi Framework includes Level 6, organizations from the first level that relies on the creation of spreadsheets and heterogeneous data sources, to level 6 that can have insight into intuition. Progress from a level to the next level requires repeating business role identification system execution, business process authentication, and technological selection. Understand your organization in what location in Lobi Framework, and then consider the next level of active, process and needs. Those organizations who have successfully realize BI have gained a lot of rewards. In terms of maintaining and evolving their BI environment, some of our customers have created an advantage or is considering BI-centric advantages.
There is a wide range of recognition and understanding between meeting business needs and BI solution. In order to create value to the organization, it is necessary to manage prediction and consumption information with BI solution.
BI technology trend
The influence of the external market and the strategic consideration of the company directly guides the trend of BI, discussing sufficient market demand and correct evaluation in detail below.
Performance management
Wayne Eckerson Of The Data WareHousing Institute defines Enterprise Performance Management (BPM), 'a series of business and applications design to optimize the execution of corporate strategies'. Gartner believes that by 2005, 40% of companies will use performance management. The role of BPM is to provide them need to manage activity and their ability to trust.
By enabling business processes, transaction systems, data warehouses, and BI, BI, BPM can create closed-loop market decision-making processes. In BPM, the process begins to define a strategic objective for high-level management. Then, create tactical execution plans to do activities. Those activities were monitored, the conclusions were evaluated, and then made a strategic subtle adjustment, planning and implementation of the organization continued to advance in the expected direction.
The survey of Gartner's second quarter of 2004 for business performance management software vendors, no enterprises have absolute advantages in this field, although some software vendors are approaching leading position. The economic downturn reminds the company's leaders' success is based on savvy business decisions, oversee the results of these decisions. The legislature's bills and coordination also requires managers to control their business processes and practices while providing data protection and reporting outside. The impact of these two aspects creates the demand for performance management solutions.
Product module integration
By merging and acquisition, large organizations have collected a large number of BI products. Some organizations have tried to standardize on specialized product kits. This has always been a challenge because people tend to use their favorite BI products. Consider a robust product distributor, distribute 7 different BI software products. Every particular purpose service is supported by a manufacturer. When standardization is their goal, it is difficult to cause a lot of dissatisfaction. As a result, these organizations aim at the best products in a species because there is no separate supplier to provide the best product kits, including special and structured queries, standard reports, OLAP, abnormal reports, data mining and analysis capabilities. . Gartner believes that most companies will need more BI tools, they must be part of the integrated decision in the BI environment. Similarly, data definitions, data consistent and compatibility related issues, in information consumption in multiple BI products, will continue to be inefficient. Unfortunately, this problem will not be resolved until a manufacturer who dominates the dominant.
Structured and unstructured data
Most Bi products can only handle structured data, which are captured by other applications or transaction processing system, such as customer orders and business processing of ERP applications. However, few BI products have the ability to inherit unstructured data, such as documents and images. The organization captures a large number of non-structured data, such as the daily email and email reply. Meta Group estimates an average of 70% of corporate information assets to be unstructured. Due to its form of form and structured data integration, the use value of non-structured data is limited. For example, analyze most profit sources will generate a list of customers and their characteristics. If this information is based on the establishment of a customer-based threshold, it is necessary to raise a risk that there is no profitable customer, but these customers may become profitable customers. Information about potential customers may be included in unstructured data formats, such as feedback on newsletter. When structured and unstructured data are presented, it will be provided to the subject area of personal insights.
Data quality
This is not a new topic, but the data quality difference is indeed a poison of the BI program. Gartner believes that "to 2007, the key data of more than 25% of the enterprises within 1,000 wealth is 1000, that is, not accurate or incomplete". Data quality difference will result in dissatisfaction with information consumers, eventually restrict and abandon the use of BI. When our customers work to solve this problem, BI software vendors have been positioned in auxiliary roles through data reorganization, verification and notification. By integrating these capabilities, when data consumers browse, the BI scheme can highlight data issues or verify the accuracy of data. In addition, data quality difference has attracted information consumers, which will reduce their dissatisfaction with data quality. These are beneficial for information consumers, but also for BI vendors.
Predictive analysis
Mature BI users need predictive analysis, imitation "if, how". For example, some people may analyze the market through geographic regions and time periods. This information can be used to predict the market trend in the future. When queries and reporting capabilities, according to the data processed by historical events and transactions, it is limited by the prediction model. The spreadsheet application provides a lot of features because the BI application has capable access and presentation information, and predictive analysis is a natural extension. However, Meta Group believes that the predictive analysis is embedded in enterprise applications (CRM, SCM, etc.) is increasing, replacing data mining solutions for purchasing standards.
Practical and acceptability
The spreadsheet program is widely used in size because they choose the easiest use of intuition. Gartner believes that most of the BI users in the enterprise are occasional information consumers, they only need basic reports and spreadsheet functions. Unfortunately, most BI programs have a function and characteristics far beyond which people have accepted. Similarly, the information consumer is classified, depending on the function and characterization definition level. This method provides an individual's appropriate skill to help them improve skills. The results of this method are still progressive and developed by intellectual workers, and then create value.
The economic concentration, the legislature of the legislature and the advancement of BI technology show a good opportunity for the prosperity of BI manufacturers. From the historical incident, BI software vendors are expanded from user licensing and product suite to become industrial standards. These events are affecting the technical trends in the BI field. Organization should be aware that their investment value in the BI field will never be better.
