In the early part of 2007, Neil Raden wrote an article entitled “Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable“. In this article, he argues that the a data warehouse (BI 1.0) is a big, slow, expensive machine for cranking out analytical data, and when it does, the data is highly-structured, only allowing a rigidly defined set of of questions to be answered. He continues that in the day of doing Google searches and social networks, that finding the information you want is a matter of “mashing up” data from everywhere. That is, BI 2.0 needs to be able to get data from where ever it is, and do the integration on the fly.
He also mentions, as I have in a previous article here, that master data management (MDM) systems can be used to remove from the traditional data warehouse the complex work of data integration. I see this happening more and more for the reasons I expressed earlier, mainly a reduced total cost of ownership and an increased usability of the information. MDM systems are perfectly suited to the “data integration” part of the overall business intelligence world, and as such, helps to allow the traditional data warehouse evolve to a smaller, quicker, and less expensive machine to operate. Also, sourcing a data warehouse from an MDM system means that analytical data can be provided far easier and quicker than before, and this supports Neil Radan’s BI 2.0.
I have worked with organizations that have come to the conclusion that the types, amounts and sources of information needed to run the business properly are constantly changing as the organization tries to keep up with or keep ahead of the competition in a more and more volatile business environment. What resulted was the organization stepping backward in the maturity of its data warehouse (according to the ” Data Warehouse Maturity Model” I mentioned in a previous article). One organization in particular, to get the data the business needs in front of them faster, did an end-run around the data warehouse and started pulling data from whatever source system they thought had what they needed. I have to admit that the web-based interface they built was very impressive, and they could indeed deliver information quickly.
The problem I had with it was simply that they had ignored all the “best practices” about doing good data integration, good data governance and good data management. Because they built their solution outside the normal project path of the organization, in order to avoid the lengthly project schedules and extra costs, they side-stepped everything the organization had put in place to mitigate just the kinds of problems that this new development brought up again. And the organization had suffered the same problems in the past! I was amazed that the business unit in question was allowed to do this, but in the end, you had to sympathize with them. All they wanted was the data in a form they could use, and quickly. The solution should have been to change the processes to allow for these kinds of tools, but still keeping the principles of proper data management in place.
So, they were trying to do Business Intelligence 2.0 by using Web 2.0 type features on top of an immature approach to enterprise data management. In the end, I think it will hurt them more than help them, but who knows. These days things change so fast inside and outside business’s that even problems like this can disappear amongst everything else that goes on.
I would like to know if anyone is or has worked somewhere where a proper implementation of “Business Intelligence 2.0″ is or has happened. Please share your experiences in the comments section.