Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Trends: 8 for ’08

Let’s look into the crystal ball for 2008.  What industry trends will affect our industry during the next year and beyond? These trends are NOT product pitches nor are they all positive.

There are two underlying themes across all these trends. First, total cost of ownership (TCO) is a significant factor in the adoption of trends. TCO is not merely license costs, but how much time, resources, skills and change is necessary to implement a trend. Budget costs are often trivial in the overall TCO calculation. Trends that lower the TCO for BI, DW and performance management will accelerate their adoption.

The second theme is that most enterprises need an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach. Enterprises (that are a real operating business) have data and people reporting/analyzing that data to make business decisions. They might not be doing it well (getting the data), but they are doing it now.

Trends where the underlying systems, data and people can evolve will have a greater chance for success. The big bang, i.e. replace everything approach, sounds great, but most times it is cost-prohibitive and people are not going to be able to absorb that much change anyway.

Enterprises are ready for changes, but not wholesale replacements. And it often gets lost on the technologists, but enterprises are in the business of selling product and services not building IT systems. These systems are support functions only.  No matter how cool the new tool is, it is only useful if it helps the business sell more or make more profit.

The 8 for ’08 trends that should be making significant impact on our industry:

1. ŸDazed and Confused: Product Roadmaps, Upgrades and Migration
2. ŸThe Song Remains the Same: Data Shadows Systems continue to be the pervasive reporting and analytic platform
3. Ÿ No Quarter: Data Integration Suites enable EDM
4. Ÿ Houses of the Holy: ELT lite continues to build momentum
5. Ÿ Ramble On: Traditional BI vendor shortlist expands
6. Ÿ Stairway to Heaven: Cost- and Resource-effective tools rule
7. Ÿ Dazed & Confused (again): Emerging technologies remain emerging
8. Ÿ Nobody's Fault but Mine: Data governance slowly continues to emerge

Each week we will discuss one of the trends.

Comments

[Miky Schreiber]

Everyone will claim that their trend has the lowest TCO. That will make a new trend: More & more advisors will work in the BI industry, advising big companies what to do and which trend to choose.

Miky,

You are correct. Many vendors claim that their software lowers TCO and some even claim that their products reduces time to develop solutions from months & years to days & hours. This does make it more difficult for people to really separate the hype from reality.

You are also correct about more consultants or advisors are also needed. (Full disclosure, I am one of those people.)

But a word of caution regarding advice: Many of these advisors do not know which solutions really have the TCO or may advice toward a choice that is not.

And your comment referred to big companies which can afford more costly solutions while small to medium businesses (SMB) cannot and definitely need to examine the lower TCO solutions.

DW, BI and performance management will become more pervasive IF the TCO gets to be more reasonable for the SMB market but also for the big companies too.

Thanks for your feedback,
Rick

[Edith Ohri]

About the high TCO:
In the old days, a new type of system was rendered first on an office-service basis. That way, nobody needs to commit high TCO before the technology is fully ready and sensibly downscaled. It seems that the service option is somehow ignored. My product (GT data mining) serves as a "consultant tool" thus saves all the high indirect costs (and risks). The reason why it is possible is because: (a) an effective analytics of UNSUPERVISED data, and (b) the ability of meta-analysis across various data sources without integrating them. After the relevant indicators are detected, the rest of their routine implementation can rely on existing data retrieval tools that exist in most of systems.
Isn't it the best way to go about high TCO?

Regards,
Edith

[Tim]

Hi Rick, is there an easy set of links to each of the eight articles?

Would be great if the bulleted list was hyperlinked.

Cheers,
Tim Graham