BI instill the new brain to the 21th century modern businesses

If you think cloud computing is the wind under modern enterprise’s wing, then BI (Business Intelligence) would be the new brain to stimulate today’s business strategy, to help streamline the business process, to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

What’s exactly BI? Business intelligence (BI) is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. BI provides software applications such as corporate performance management, business analytics/predictive analytics, data visualization including executive dashboard and scoreboard, and many more. In summary, BI bring up the data insight to run today’s business with full-fledged tools and statistics.

Talking about BI vendors’ landscape, it has been changed significantly in this couple of years, which also prove BI would play the pivotal both in businesses cross vertical and technology vendors plan: IBM bought Congno (the Canada based BI vendor focusing on performance management) and SPSS (predictive analytics vendor); Oracle bought Hyperion; SAP bought Business Object.

SAS, the largest private software company in US, focus on developing integrated BI solutions since 1976, SAS also top the #1 employee-friendly companies recently; Though SAS doesn’t have stock listed on NYSE, the CEO and founder Dr. Jim Goodnight could be the best business intelligent mentor for Wall Street, especially in the last couple of years, we experienced the biggest recession in recent history, partly caused by the leadership failure.

Will BI go to SAAS (software as a service) model and lead to the “Cloud” in the future, I think that would be the trend, but it will take some time to grow with enhancing scalability, governance, risk-control and compliance.

BI is the most critical business technology imperative for both today’s large enterprise and small businesses in 21th century.

Posted in: Business Intelligence