The next generation of Business Intelligence (BI 2.0)

After the Web 2.0, it's time of BI 2.0. Everyone of BI area agrees that a lot of changes are happening, although several important analysts and professionals of industry try to resist the use of the name Business Intelligence 2.0.

Although Business Intelligence 2.0 is a buzzword, with a convenient marketing of the version number, the concepts proposed are quite interesting. By the way, there is nothing new about most of the concepts, what is changing is how to integrate with BI, through new approaches. The BI 2.0 is an extension of the traditional BI, not replacing it only complementing. Some concepts of new BI are based on the concepts of Web 2.0.

The BI 2.0 includes the concepts and technologies of data mining, statistical analysis, advanced visualization, mobile technology, alert notifications, rich reports, predictive analytics, BI search, text analytics and semantic data model.

The BI 2.0 also takes advantage with the concepts, processes, architectures and technologies that improve business process and event processing, as Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA), Business Process Management(BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Complex Event Processing(CEP) and Event Stream Processing(ESP).

While the main function of traditional BI (sometimes called BI 1.0) is to analyze the past, the BI 2.0 is to predict the future, using the concepts of traditional BI together the concepts of BI 2.0 to build a smart picture. The BI 2.0 is more pro-active than reactive. The traditional BI is closed loop, unable outside input data, because it occurs after the events, and BI 2.0 is open loop because enable input data when the events occur, and its real time analysis.

The BI 2.0 is more intuitive, interactive, pervasive, collaborative and process-driven.

The main effects of BI 2.0 in the companies are: Data integration and comprehension (using Master Data Management), roles (people with many roles at the same time), lower cost of BI licensing (many people using BI), convergence of structured and unstructured data, convergence with the rest of operations.

But one of the most important concepts of BI 2.0 is not about technology, is about people. The technical innovation is the easy part, the hard is to align the organization. It is important to focus on people, remember that with the continuous technical innovation, people are taking cultural shifts, and people will use insights, a new way of thinking and the concepts of social networking and collaboration to work more effectively.

The BI 2.0 allows a BI for everyone, not only for executives, power users or information workers, and extends beyond corporate boundaries, to suppliers and customers.

The traditional BI makes the deal, is useful and keeps alive, but BI 2.0 will provide a new way for the companies improve their results.

Ten Business Intelligence Trends and Forecasts

1. The companies will be more interested in BI solutions that can be implemented and that shows results quickly.

2. The concept that BI is not just another IT project, BI is a continuous process to provide accurate information to help the business users to take better decisions, will continue to grow within companies.

3.The globalization has increased the concern about access data in real time. The companies have data distributed across worldwide, in different locations, becoming the data integration in an essential issue. To fill this gap between the demand and the current reality, the companies will need to use increasingly analytic applications with real-time monitoring, near real-time dashboards, and other applications that use the concepts of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP).

4. The concern with data quality and the utilization of Master Data Management (MDM) will grow and also how make the convergence of structured and unstructured data.

5. IT and Business increasingly will work together. The business users will have more participation in the decision about the BI solutions, from the choice of technology and BI vendors to definition of business model.

6. BI will continue improving to be more intuitive, interactive, pervasive, collaborative and process-driven.

7. BI will have a continuing growth in small and medium-sized companies.

8. The BI vendor consolidation happened in 2007, will cause more interest in open source BI.

9. The BI as a Service will continue to grow, because offers many benefits over the traditional BI vendors, like no required purchase of hardware, significant faster and lower cost in implementation.

10. The BI will be more integrated with Business Process Management (BPM) for analyzing historical process data and support decision business processes.