‘Few enterprises view BI as a strategic tool’

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Gold the most preferred investment

: Gartner credits him for taking business intelligence (BI) from an esoteric “backwater” to a mainstream and highly valued research area. Howard Dresner, who spent 13 years at Gartner and built up the analyst firm’s BI practice, says his vision in 1989 was to establish information democracy—getting information in the hands of all constituents. At that time, eyebrows were raised in management circles with respect to the various pros and cons of this new hypothesis, says the chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions Corp. He sees analytics as simply applied business intelligence. “And, this is what I call BI with a purpose,” he adds. In a recent interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, Dresner informs that the next high ground is business performance management (BPM), which is what BI becomes when it evolves. Excerpts:

How has the BI market developed and where is it going?

Increasingly, business intelligence is becoming a feature of business performance management. When I was at Gartner, I recognised that the market was changing—markets do this, they converge functionally and other wise. And this has been happening for the past couple of years now. Increasingly, performance management has become a very high priority especially for business people.

Traditionally, business intelligence has been more of a technology issue. In contrast to this, performance management is more of a business initiative that is being enabled by technology. And, it’s built on BI. You can’t do BPM without BI. So, BPM at this moment of time has a lot of energy surrounding it than BI.

Is BPM the next step to BI?

It’s the other way around. BPM is sort of absorbing BI. It is all about aligning people and process with a purpose. Typically, CIOs and CFOs are grappling with the same set of challenges: How well is your business performing today? What can you do to improve it? BPM delivers the visibility into their businesses that they need to answer these questions—and helps them do what has to be done to improve performance and successfully reach their goals. With BPM, they can collect, organise and analyse data—then distribute it throughout the enterprise using a rich, unified workspace that makes business performance management easier and more powerful than ever before.

Has BI evolved as you had envisaged way back in 1989?