BI: The Cat’s Pajamas
May 1, 2008
ITBusiness.ca has a useful discussion of the market for business intelligence. “BI”, as the cognoscenti prefer it, is an umbrella term with fuzzy edges. Business intelligence is the corporate version of military or “real” intelligence; that is, obtaining and analyzing information in order to gain an advantage. There’s a Society for Competitive Information Professionals that promulgates guidelines for the conduct of “intelligence”by organizations. Cognos, now part of IBM, stressed its software’s usefulness for BI. The same leitmotif has been riffed by some search and content processing vendors. But the music of money clattering into the sales tills has been increasing. Now, many vendors in content management to enterprise customer support systems are chanting, “BI, BI, BI”.
I urge you to read the ITBusiness.ca article. Vawn Himmelsbach, the author, provides a useful case about BI’s payoff for a tire company. There’s a good discussion of BI dissolving into other, presumably more easily understood enterprise applications. Even the nemesis of data aggregation gets mentioned, a rarity in most cheerleading about “intelligence” whether SCIP-like or the somewhat more free-form intelligence practiced by government entities. If you are looking for some ideas to help you sell, “intelligence”, the article includes some useful pointers. My hunch is that consultants will find this statement particularly bracing:
For the channel, the opportunity lies in professional services, says Rowe. If you look at the professional services to license ratio, it’s usually a one-to-one ratio up to a three-to-one ratio, meaning if they sell a $50,000 BI license, they can get another $50,000 to $150,000 in professional services.
For more information about business intelligence, check out the white papers on the SAS Institute’s Web site. You can ignore the one I wrote, but the others are quite good.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2008
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