26th February 2010
Business Intelligence (BI) is buzzing again this week. Followers of FSN will know that I am not a great fan of the distinction between BI and Corporate Performance Management. To me they are two sides of the same coin – essentially delivering information and insight to the desktop. The challenge has always been how best to present that information and what technology should be used to deliver it. The mid-market has been the biggest challenge of the lot because of the paucity of skills and the resources that need to be invested to harvest information from a variety of data sources and all the knotty problems of data quality that this entails. But we seem to be entering a new phase both in terms of data visualisation (it’s definitely getting easier) and the where information is held. Cloud computing, software plus services and on-premises approaches all provide viable solutions but the trend seems to be towards 24/7 information on tap delivered in ever more imaginable ways. The news this week that SAP Business Objects is to provide “On-demand” business intelligence will stimulate the debate about how best to deliver BI and over the next two weeks we will look at how far the market has progressed.
