In my blog about the Jean Michel Jarre concert I wrote that the seeds of innovation can often be found many years before.
Jorgen Heizenberg of Cap Gemini responds:
You mention that the seeds of innnovation can be found in the past - which can be true - however I am still waiting for them to bloom! If you look at the functionality of past BI applications (EIS, Decision Support, Expert Systems, Olap, Reporting etc) and the current ones there is not much improvement from the enduser point of view. Sure you now have 'cool stuff' like zero footprint but I am still waiting for intelligent BI tools (Intelligence meaning the possibility to adapt to changing circumstances). For example: Why do I have to look for exceptions in a OLAP Cube i.s.o. of the tool showing this to me proactively. Why do I have to look for a specific report (often in some kind of subfolder with a completely stupid name) that matches with the current business problem that I am facing i.s.o. typing my problem in a Google like environment and sit back for the answers sorted by relevance. And so on... After this whole BI consolidation it has been so quiet in this market. Everybody is figuring out how to integrate the x# solutions in their product stack but where is the real innovation? I am not seeing it! Are you?
Jorgen makes a few interesting points, but I dona??t agree on everything he says. He contrasts integration with innovation, but this a?? in my opinion a?? is not a contrast. Integration of business intelligence technologies and performance management applications is an important innovation. It provides users the opportunity to make use of standard applications for standard problems, and homemade applications for specific problems, within a single environment making use of the same data and metadata. To continue Jorgens thoughts: why do I have to redo half my work if I move from one application to the next? And what about integration of BI and EPM into business applications, so that business processes become smarter. Ia??d call that pretty substantial innovation.
Another point I want to make is that in innovative processes it sometimes takes a while before we get it a??righta??. The seeds are planted years ago perhaps, but it takes a few generations to blossom. Two years ago there was a first round of a??Google search style information accessa?? to BI tools. Most got it completely wrong. Keyword search is virtually useless in BI environments. You may search for a??total revenuea?? and find all kinds of reports, including tax reports for the a??internal revenue service (IRS)a??. But you wouldna??t find the report that lists the different types of revenue, and then the total revenue underlines, like this:
Rev. A 100,000
Rev. B 250,000
Rev. C 150,000
500,000
And this would be exactly the report youa??d be looking for. Already at Hyperion, we developed Google search integration, based on metadata. Perfect? Perhaps not, but a whole lot better than some other stuff out there. And it gets you closer to Jorgena??s vision of sitting back and look for the answers sorted by relevance.
Check out Jorgena??s blog: www.biguru-online.com
frank
