The BI Technology Enterprises Rely on for Business Agility

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence Agility" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

So, let’s look at the business intelligence and other technology that enterprises rely on for business agility. This is possibly the most important of the slides so if you walk away from this presentation with anything, then it’s the message of this particular slide. What you see here on the vertical axis is the response time of applications. And that’s actually a logarithmic scale so every marker on that scale is actually ten times slower than the one below it.

Right at the bottom we have the range of real time response, and the we have less than one tenth of a second, and above that where people interact with a computer you have about from two or three seconds down to one tenth of a second. Above that are transactional systems response ranges. You get out to about fifteen seconds. Above that you get what are really batch processes, and then you go out into minutes, and the next level is another kind of batch level that goes to hours and after that to days.

Now, what we’ve drawn on this graph is a number of curves that represent years in history, starting with 1960. You see the curve gradually move in a kind of southeast direction across this graph. Gradually taking in more and more applications in terms of what computing was able to do and the direction of those arrows that are heading south east indicate an area of as yet unrealized applications. Gradually you see this curve eating up all of the potential things to do in the business sense also in a scientific sense I suppose.

And then these white arrows that are kind of curving downwards in a southwest direction, they represent the movement of applications because the response time changes and they move down from slow batch to medium batch to fast batch to transactional to interactive into real time. And this movement is happening all the time and this marginal technology which is fundamentally Moore’s Law which is being illustrated here.

It just keeps on going and every year that goes by, certainly ever five or six years you hear of something almost completely new for instance complex event processing, streaming, the analysis of streamed data, that didn’t exist before about 2003, it suddenly comes up, and what you’re actually seeing with that is you’re seeing business intelligence reporting begin to become near real time.

This is the march of technology, and being able to negotiate the march of technology is what successful business is about. Really it’s one of the primary factors in successful business, it is probably better to say. Maybe three or four years ago we never thought of BI as anything other than a set of applications with a bit of infrastructure sitting over a data warehouse.

There may have been sophisticated BI applications, but we didn’t really think of there being an overarching architecture to them. But now what’s happening in the world of BI, we’re seeing more and more of vendors that are now moving towards becoming a platform for BI, rather than just delivering individual applications. This is an example of the kind of strategic technology change that happens when you get this regular unavoidable change in technology.

To summarize what we’ve talked about so far, there are four levels to change, global, sector based, business processes, and technology. Global changes are beyond your control. There’s nothing you can do about them, and you probably didn’t cause them. Sector factors depend upon corporate excellence. Business process factors depend upon agility, and technology is in permanent flux and very difficult to master.

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Now I will build and elaborate a little bit more on this focus around change, this idea of how process and the technology in support of process evolve. We’ll talk about a roadmap of how you need to categorize and deal within the current environment of change. What’s also very interesting in this environment, especially as we’ve gone through the last couple of years, really starting last year and moving to this year, is the shift from cost containment and efficiencies to top line revenue growth.