BI Evolution - Innovation and Development

When SAS executives, industry experts and leading research analysts were asked about the evolution of BI and the importance of investing in people with strong problem-solving skills. Their responses included the following insights:

Question: How do you see business intelligence being used 2 to five 5 from now?

Real Time Decision Support

Until recently, business intelligence was limited to basic query and reporting, and it
never really provided that much intelligence.

The amount of information doubling every year - difficult ensuring information systems are keeping up the volume and the data analysis capabilities.

We can expect "a lot more real-time decision making and much higher degrees of analytics involved within business intelligence". For example, a financial services company may use more than a thousand models for making decisions on a daily basis, and they have all the latest information included in those models.

Alert Based KPI Reporting

Every morning executives will check their latest performance metrics before they check their e-mail. But with most enterprises having over 100 key key performance indicators [KPIs] that becomes an overbearning task - so operational BI, using alert mechanisms will dominate. This brings us right back to Exception Management.

Operational BI will drive more analytics-driven automation, tied into information delivery tools, to warn business users about troubling trends that might cause problems in the future.

Operational BI

BI solutions will include more real-time capabilities to make it easier to push information to business users in context and in real time. Its a matter of doing smart things faster versus doing not-so-smart things faster. Real-time applications will continue to be more analytically driven, as opposed to employing simple business rules.

The fully integrated solutions and industry specific configurations will also make it easier for business users to deploy BI models in real time and from any online device. This supports the concept of a service-oriented architecture.

• For IT, BI innovation is about a single platform for delivering information in many different ways to many different users, depending on their needs.
• For business users, it means finding the answers they need automatically from whatever
  application they normally work in every day. Its also about thorough analyses based on the most up-to-date data.

Business users no longer have to wait for BA's or IT to provide them with answers they need daily. The answers will come to them automatically via the interfaces and applications they already use every day.

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