I think of BI as reaching a point at which it can become a great deal more flexible in terms of deployment. The question isn't so much which industry, nor even so much and certainly not why. Rather, I still think the major goal is pervasive BI and broadly applied across functions. "Mashup BI".
Simply stated, 10 years ago, people were asking some of these same questions about the web. Today we take it for granted that one can and should use a combination of websites to create a mosaic of information attending to your concerns. BI has lagged in this pervasive quality.
From a management perspective, I should use BI to focus my employees' attentions on those goals that I perceive coming from internal and external change. My BI platform should serve the purposes of rapid development and integration of these changes. Somehow we have not processed numbers, even given our longevity in the industry better than the web has managed text. Nor have we managed scalability in the database arena as well when it comes to BI - which is a very odd thing considering that we should be first. Yet more data is processed through company websites, especially ecommerce, than through company BI, and BI customers still fuss about performance.
I think this is a consequence of focusing too tightly on single BI applications rather than the entire scope of what company management does to focus the attention of their employees into a measurable performance discipline. If a company is providing access to company information without adding a measurable discipline (or one that is self-evident) then they are wasting employee's time and compute resources. My BI dashboard and internal communications should be every bit as intriguing as what's going on at Twitter. If your company is using Websense, in that regard you're already too late. You're not making the company's business interesting and exciting to your own employees.
Granted this requires a cultural adjustment, but the technology should not be an excuse and we in the profession need to work towards making analytic ubiquity possible at reasonable costs.
Ultimately I think there will emerge higher level abstracts which will obviate some aspects of the scratch building we do today, though the need will continue. You don't see much tweaking in Point of Sale Systems in Retail. It's done - a register is a register. Soon, an accounting department will be similarly commodified as well as all of the standard KPIs necessary. Then restaurant inventories with KPIs regarding the turnover differences between fish and cheese and one with popular wines, linked to afficionado ratings. It's time to start thinking at the next level of business performance abstraction. This requires that BI be strategic - that it be the end vision of capturing and focusing the attention of every employee in every department that has a computer on driving business performance.
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