Business Intelligence systems are all the rage in just about every data-intensive industry these days. The idea of getting behind the numbers and actually being able to produce forecasts based on trends and historical data is the holy grail for armies of business analysts. Of course, the data is just that – data. There are numbers but not necessarily answers. And so even as many organizations struggle to get a handle on whatever bits of information they can glean from the BI systems, folks are starting to talk about the next steps in the evolution of the field.
The goal is to try to suss out the “why” part of the details when a query is put together. A recent column addresses this issue with a few interesting observations Among them, this:
To provide greater value, BI tools must evolve in two ways. They must enable users to answer deeper, sometimes “fuzzier” questions about the enterprise. Then they must make it possible for general business users to easily obtain information.
And this:
Capabilities like entity extraction and fuzzy search, long staples of unstructured search engines, have put these types of discovery activities entirely within reach.
In other words, the searches can be stacked, with the sales data generated from the BI system combined with a search engine “fuzzy” query of anything that might be useful for details about activities during the time period covered. BI data can’t account on its own for some natural disaster event or the loss of a major customer or supplier. Combining that data with the other information, however, can help an organization figure out if they are falling apart (loss of a major client) or dealing with an anomaly, and they can make that decision much more quickly and easily if the search process actually pulls up the relevant information at the time.
So it looks like the BI space is going to be pretty busy over the coming years with new developments. Certainly worth keeping an eye on it.
