Business Intelligence: Getting Smarter in a Class with Some Lousy Students
September 22, 2008
Business intelligence sounds more up town than search. Analytics resonates with quantitative goodness. Most employees look back on their classes in mathematics with a combination of nostalgia as in “I wish I would have taken more math” and horror as in “I hated Miss Blackburn’s algebra class”. I did a job for a major university to answer the question, “Can we be number one in computer science?” The answer was, “No.” There were not many math majors who planned on working in the US once the sheepskins were handed out. It’s tough to rise to the top when your future endowment funding sources are working in Wu Han or Mumbai. Loyalties and money may go to the local high school where the math wizards’ genius was first recognized and cultivated.
I find it amusing that search vendors are rushing to become players in the business intelligence arena. Now established business intelligence companies are encouraging the running of the bull-oney. SPSS, SAS, Cognos, and Business Objects have learned to love text because their customers demanded that structured and unstructured data be mind for insights. Ignoring comments on warranty cards, in emails, or in voice calls to a help desk do yield useful information. Some companies learn what customers loathe and then don’t fix the problem. Called your mobile provider lately? How about your bank, assuming it’s still in business? See what I mean.
When I read a good analysis of how business intelligence vendors are getting smarter, I learn something about how the market perceives business intelligence. But I wonder why these analyses don’t dig into the deeper issues associated with vendors who reinvent themselves in order to make sales. I’m not sure the product innovation is of the same quality as the marketing collateral. In short, vendors talk a good game, but the delivery remains much the way it always has. Math and programming people have to be taught the system. The business intelligence system is then set up with rules spelled out. The biggest change is that the traditional method is too expensive, so companies want short cuts to business intelligence goodness. Enter the search and content processing vendor. The idea is simple: index content and convert a user’s query to a form that generates a report. Now will the report have the same concern with the niceties and nuances of hand crafted statistical instructions operating on a well formed data cube? Maybe? But the new approaches are a heck of a lot easier, faster, and cheaper. Licensees are asked to conclude, “You get all three with our new system.”
Take a gander at the well written “Business Intelligence Gets Smart” published on September 5, 2008, by Intelligent Enterprise’s Doug Henschen here. You will have to put up with an annoying ad flop over, but the content is worth the annoyance. The key point of the write up is that business intelligence “improves business performance.” This is a key point. Most search and content processing systems don’t generate a hard return on investment. Business intelligence, according to the Information Week Research Business Intelligence Survey cited by Mr. Henschen does. That’s good news, and it encourages vendors with non-ROI systems to repackage these products as bottom line centric solutions. For me, the most important parts of this write up were the charts and graphs. Mr. Henschen does a good job of pulling together the numbers that help put business intelligence in context.
I would like to offer several observations and, of course, invite comment:
- Business intelligence remains a complicated area, and it does not lend itself to facile solutions.
- Most business intelligence systems require that content be transformed, then processed, and finally analyzed. If the content processing goes off track, the fix can be time consuming and expensive. BI systems, like search and content processing systems, can experience cost overruns because the assumptions about the source information were wrong or shallow.
- Business intelligence even when implemented with some of the search centric solutions on the market like Endeca’s Latitude require a math or programming wizard to configure the systems.
Quite a few search and text analytics companies are asserting that “we do business intelligence”. The statement is both true and false. In order to avoid coming down on the false side of the statement, short cuts should be avoided. Implementing business intelligence is similar to Miss Blackburn’s algebra class. It’s demanding, a great deal of work, and usually disliked by those without the appetite or the aptitude for the tasks.
Stephen Arnold, September 22, 2008
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