Business intelligence software is evolving into its older sibling, business performance management, a combination of planning,
budgeting, reporting, and benchmarking tools, according to the father of BI, Howard Dresner. At the same time, the main obstacle
to BI or BPM adoption remains cultural rather than technological, he said.
Dresner coined the term "business intelligence" in 1989 while an analyst at research company Gartner. At that time, the software
industry was mired in acronyms like DSS (decision support system) and EIS (executive information system). Dresner was looking
for a phrase that would elevate the debate around those terms and better define the access to and analysis of quantitative
information by a wide variety of users.
He left Gartner in 2005 to join Hyperion as its chief strategy officer. Currently, pure-play BI software providers including
Hyperion are seeing application vendors like Microsoft and Oracle try to muscle in on their turf, putting them under added
pressure to offer more capabilities.
Dresner recently chatted with IDG News Service about the BI industry over the past 17 years. An edited transcript of that
conversation follows.
IDGNS: Does today's definition of BI differ from what you originally intended?
Dresner: It's probably been redefined a little. It's all about ways to deliver information to end users without needing them
to be experts in operational research. Early on, some companies tried to make the term even broader than quantitative information
to include unstructured content. But it became clear that it was a simple problem which needed to be solved with structured
content. That provides far more value to business than trying to boil the entire ocean. BI is in the middle, structured information
at one end and the user at the other end.
A lot of things we talked about in 1989 were completely irrelevant. It started broadening and deepening. Back in 1989 only
a select development group understood what it was about and were trying it. I felt like the lone voice in the wilderness for
years. Some people said BI was a oxymoron.
IDGNS: Have the general improvements in computer technology made BI more readily adoptable?
Dresner: Possibly, possibly not. It's more how do you work out the value you're really going to get out of it. You do find
a lot of BI was shelfware or partial shelfware meaning it already got installed but people didn't use it. We'd just give someone
a query tool and a data warehouse and say a prayer. It probably wasn't enough. We'd give them query tools and warehouses and
somehow life would be better.
The next big thing is how to give people insight. If BI delivers a key virtue to you, wow, you have something to anchor the
quality activity with. Say the cost of a product line spiked, you know that nugget of insight. Then you need to figure out
why it happened -- is it an error, a trend? Instead of the approach: here's a query tool, hope you find something impactful.
We're figuring out how to get actionable information into everyone's hands.
Business performance management is built on BI, but it goes beyond that, it's also thinking about operational and planning
capabilities. You need to develop plans -- how do you know whether information is good or bad, whose gut feeling do you go
with? BPM is the next big thing. It's sort of what BI is growing up to become. Data quality matters, it's tied to operational
planning. If you do it right, you have to really believe in the numbers.
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