Why you shouldn’t be getting your ‘BI 2.0’ from your BI vendor

InformationWeek recently reported that the total revenue for the 2008 Business Intelligence (BI) software market came in at $8.8 billion, with six vendors -- SAP/Business Objects, SAS Institute, Oracle IBM /Cognos, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy -- owning 75% of the market. The report also says that BI software sales experienced 22% growth from 2007 to 2008. The BI market appears to be a very healthy place.

And yet James Koblielus, Forrester’s BI Analyst, recently published a great blog and paper titled: Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy. In it he talks about the shift taking place in BI shops to a new “mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications.” He explains this shift by summarizing that “enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers.” In case you missed it, the meta-message from Forrester is simple: companies are looking for new ways to make faster decisions because their current BI solutions don’t deliver.

While I don’t agree that BI Mashups are going to (or should) come from the BI vendors, I certainly agree with Kobielus that change is coming. And I think that change will be based on enterprise mashups.

You only need to look at the speed with which companies are acquiring, merging, failing, and consolidating (sometimes all of these at once) to understand the intense real-time information needs of decision-makers. As this need increases, it won’t be today’s BI systems doing the work. Why? Current BI approaches are inflexible, fragile, costly, slow, and have little user-facing self-service capabilities. Don’t believe me? Go tell your BI team you want to create your own dashboard and share it with your department via Sharepoint. Prepare for uncontrollable laughter or utter contempt. Heck, the mere fact you have to ask an ‘expert’ to do it for you is something of a failure.

Kobielus’ use of the phrase ‘BI mashup’ is very telling. He supports his thesis with an outline of a ‘BI Mashup Maturity Model’ with levels from ‘Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications’ to ‘Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance’. And that’s where he loses me. What about this is 'Business Intelligence'? While reading this I could have sworn he was describing enterprise mashups! Sure, I understand the part where BI vendors want (and need) to embrace this ‘faster, cheaper, more flexible’ message or risk have their warehouses become nothing more than sources to enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs). But I think the more logical conclusion is this: the future of your BI system is mashups.

Yes, I am biased. But my customers, prospects, and partners aren't. In the last 3 years we’ve had countless BI-using organizations come to us with a need to address their more immediate decision-support requirements. Generally, they all want to bring more timely information to a wider-audience with more self-service, collaboration and secure sharing with peers. Yes, they want some of that data to be sourced from their BI systems. (BI systems are, afterall, very good at giving historical views of transactional information.) But their BI systems are not up to the task of being the entire solution. Fundamentally, real-time answers from real-time sources isn’t what BI vendors do. That’s an enterprise mashup. There are some other important differences as well. Take a peek at my comparison of the abstract qualities of BI and Enterprise Mashup Platforms.

I can also summarize the differences in another, more functional way. I took typical BI and EMP capabilities to create a visual comparison based on ‘audience reach’ and ‘number of dynamic data sources’. You can see that traditional BI is gaining in speed and audience reach by adding things like in memory cubes and “semi-self-serve” dashboards (it’s more like simple customization and personalization). BI is great at well-controlled reporting from a well-manicured warehouse or cube. But reach beyond that design tenet and you’re into enterprise mashup territory, I think.


Many organizations have a lot of resources invested in their BI system. And the $8.8 billion spent on BI last year certainly adds value to the enterprises that own that software. But the future of BI is about mashups. Your BI is an enterprise mashup enabler, not an enterprise mashup platform. BI has (and probably always will) have its place in reporting, forecasting and analytics. Just don’t try to force your BI to do what Enterprise Mashups do best: real-time decision-support. You want ‘BI Mashups’? Get an enterprise mashup platform.