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About 5 years ago, I was interviewing Santi Becerra, creator of Xcelsius and then a development VP at Tableau working on AI, at an IBIS conference. I asked him the question, “Where do you see Business Intelligence 5 years from today?”.
His answer was something along the lines of people receiving “bite-size” chunks of data on their mobile devices that would be derived from both BI and AI.
So here we are 5 years later and Santi was pretty much spot on. For many people, the mobile phone is the delivery option of choice and they do not want to receive big reports or interactive dashboards on it. Business users just want the “bite-size” summary or key information delivered so they can be informed concisely what they need to know.
Santi was also a lot closer in his prediction than the Gartner group that said everyone would be a self-service data scientist.
Business Intelligence vendors have been promoting the concept of self-service since it’s inception. The idea being that business users would use BI tools to explore, retrieve, analyze and visualize data without needing any assistance from IT.
However, in most organizations, that never really happened. BI tools, like BusinessObjects, were used primarily to produce operational reports and were often created by developers in the IT department. The only people who would explore and analyze data with BI tools would be business analysts who made up less than 5% of all BI tool users. The other 95% of BI users were simply consumers of the reports, dashboards and BI applications. These majority consumers were not self-serving information for themselves as much as they were expecting it to be delivered to them in a concise and easy-to-digest format.
So, despite Business Intelligence being around for some three decades promoting self-service, nothing has really changed.
Today, most organizations see self-service reporting and BI as delivering information to users via portals, network shares and, yes still, email.
The portals and delivery functionality have evolved and improved. For BusinessObjects users the portal will be either BI Launchpad, commodity portals like SharePoint or a homegrown custom portal. BusinessObjects lends itself well to all 3.
The BusinessObjects BI Launchpad has improved significantly over the last couple of releases with a new look and feel with tiles in BI 4.3 and further enhancements with the ability to include widgets of components from existing reports on the Launchpad itself (delivering “bite-size” pieces of information).
Integration with SharePoint has also become important for many BusinessObjects customers as they standardize on a Microsoft infrastructure for all their applications. Using InfoBurst Publish in conjunction with BusinessObjects is by far the best way to get the most benefits from SharePoint integration.
Custom portals have become increasingly popular as many customers look for a one-stop place where business users can go to access everything – applications, reports, dashboards, collaboration, data catalog. BI Launchpad and commodity portals may be able to provide 75% to 80% of most customers needs but a custom portal can often provide closer to 95% to 100%. The other advantage of the custom portal is that there are no access license fees to pay for every user on the portal.
In the last few months, I have seen several large customers taking the custom portal approach and adding functionality like collaboration with write back capability. There was also a great webinar on SpeakBO in August entitled “Creating a low-code external webapp with OpenDocument 101” that showed how you can quickly an effectively create a custom portal for BusinessObjects using the InfoBurst Squirrel no-code/low code tool.
Self-service BI will remain an enigma for the foreseeable future but delivering “bite-size” chunks of information and data to mobile devices is here to stay.
