BI 2.0

As companies seek to remain competitive, they are continually searching for new ways to meet or exceed the expectations of their customers.

As product development cycles are significantly shorter - so too are the product lifecycles. Companies need to rely more heavily on their business intelligence systems to stay ahead of trends and future events.

The key to this challenge is access to 'real time' or 'near real time' business intelligence and analysis. This is particularly important in the customer facing operations.

Monthly and even weekly analysis is no longer sufficient. Business information needs to be always available and always up to date.

The instantly available experience of the Internet, provides a solid benchmark of user expectations. To achieve this, businesses must develop and maintain real-time flows of business data.

Why BI 2.0?

BI 2.0 heralds the next step for BI in the business intelligence industry. BI 2.0 is used to describe the acquisition, provision and analysis of "real time" data. Earlier BI models based on data mining products [BI 1.0] have not been capable of providing timely, current data now demanded by end users.

Currently, user expectations have outpaced the capability of business intelligence software. The gap between expectation and reality is driven by two factors:

1. business rules and structures (general ledgers, product classification, asset hierarchies, etc.) are not in fact uniform, but are spread out among many disparate transaction system implementations
2. the landscape of business structures is itself in constant flux, as groups reorganize, subsidiaries are sold or new companies acquired".

Using a BI 1.0 approach, as long as business intelligence relies upon a data warehouse structure (including web-based virtual data "warehouses"), data will need to be converted into a lowest common denominator consistent set.

Since in most cases, data is sourced from multiple, disparate data sources that are constantly changing, and often volatile, the business environment to support BI 2.0 will require restructuring of IT systems to provide BI data in a genuinely true, "real time" format. In addition, typcial BI 1.0 data models and databases have been designed in a way that does not support true 'real-time' business intelligence across an enterprise.

Resolving these inadequacies is extremely difficult at best, and signals a long path to true BI capability.

Multi Data Source Capability

BI 2.0 applications can extract and aggregate data from mulitple data sources, including:

• Relational - Oracle, SQL, IBM, Teradata, Sybase, and ODBC.
• Dimensional - Cognos OLAP, SAP BW, Microsoft SSAS, Essbase, Oracle 10G, and IBM DB2 CubeViews.
• ERP - SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.
• Modern - XML, Java beans, JDBC, LDAP, WSDL.
• Satellite - Excel files, Access files, and flat files.
• Legacy and Mainframe Systems - VSAM, IMS, IDMS, and Cobol Copybooks.
• Content Management Data - FileNet, Documentum, and OpenSoft.

Future BI Capabilities

In a BI 2.0 model, business information will become more user based and controlled, allowing end users throughout the organization to view information on their particular segment to see how it's performing. The requirements of business intelligence will increase as consumer expectations increase. For this reason, it is critical to competitiveness that companies increase at the same pace or even faster than consumer expectations.

Virtual BI Tools

Using a virtual interface to display the results of BI reporting and analytics is a powerful way to visualize in one glance complex sets or large sets of data.

Video - Using Virtual Earth In The Mortgage Loan Industry

NEXT: Comparison of BI 1.0 and BI 2.0 Features

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