Three BI Trends Every CIO Must UnderstandThree BI Trends Every CIO Must Understand

BI moves from the back room to the conference room and travels beyond enterprise walls, while really big data drives strategy.

Eric Lundquist, VP & Editorial Analyst for information Business Technology Network

January 10, 2012

3 Min Read
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Clearly, BI has a learning curve, and it can be pricey, but once senior managers latch on to its capabilities, the execs that were reluctant to open their checkbooks can become the biggest proponents. The lesson for CIOs: Focus not on the technology, nor on vague business benefits, but on specific ways BI can deliver revenue, increase customer loyalty, and create new market segments.

As for where the Magic's star center, Dwight Howard, will end up playing (he has requested a trade before his contract expires at the end of this season), I'm not sure even advanced BI tools can predict that.

BI Meets The Customer Cloud

BI is moving well beyond analysis of internal data. It's now about understanding customer sentiment on social networks; building profiles of customers, suppliers, and partners; and managing your company's interactions with those external parties. "You are now bringing customers and partners into the business social networks, and the cloud has been a huge enabler of this capability," says Salesforce.com's Dayon.

In the past, BI was as static as the internal data being analyzed. It tended to deal with past trends rather than current conditions. The value of BI today is having an outward focus based on real-time information, including competitor pricing and customer sentiments expressed on social networks.

For CIOs and other business executives, applying BI to the customer cloud will require new technology skills. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + activities all have different application interfaces, which need to be pulled into the BI system and analyzed in real time. The information must be presented in a user interface that senior executives can manage and query and pushed to mobile devices. The traditional structure of an analytics department producing a regular set of defined reports is far removed from this social-network-driven BI.

Really Big Data

Big data has become one of the biggest tech buzzwords over the past year, and while there's no standard definition, McKinsey provides a good overview.

Big data can include weather statistics, demographic trends, healthcare information, and essentially any other dataset that stretches conventional storage and analytics systems. Correlating company and supplier data with customer brand sentiments and data on macro areas like population trends was beyond the capabilities of BI systems a few years ago.

If you want to acquire an understanding of correlation capabilities without spending a huge amount (or any) money, a good place to start is Google Correlate, a way to look at trends behind Google searches.

Which state in the U.S. has the highest correlation between cloud computing and middleware? That would be Maryland. While that's a bit of a trivial exercise, Google Correlate lets users develop all types of queries. A recent National Public Radio report on Correlate takes a deeper dive. Incorporating really big datasets like Google searches into your BI activities may be the next BI frontier.

Eric Lundquist,
VP and Editorial Analyst, information
[email protected]

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About the Author

Eric  Lundquist

VP & Editorial Analyst for information Business Technology Network

Eric Lundquist,
VP and Editorial Analyst, information
[email protected]

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