The third Meetup was fully dedicated to discussion. It was driven by a few PowerPoint slides from one NYBI member's presentation given at the CTO Summit in Summer of 2007.
One slide of interest was about a proposed BI Ontology reproduced, in part, below:
BI Ontology
- Decision Space
- Decision Purpose
- Decision Frequency
- Decision Impact
- Tool Space
- Data
- Models
- Experience
- Feedback
An introductory slide or two spoke to the "State of Affairs" as well the "This is how we came to be here" and spurred on 2 full hours of discussion.
Some highlights:
- Most organizations looking to introduce BI into their fold succeed in rolling out a Data Warehouse. Rolling out Reporting infrastructure is the difficult part. If the organization is lucky enough to succeed, this reporting infrastructure tends to be the most expensive investment.
- The industry itself evolved from ad-hoc tools to very structured tools and mechanisms. Approach to successful BI implementation became a Trade and a science in of itself.
- The BI Ecosystem is very large. There are a few established Tools and Tool Vendors but community of people that provide quality or reporting services is for these Tools is significantly larger.
- Vendor tools, however, are going through mergers and the Vendors are losing independence. Will a community emerge to not just support the Vendors but to actually drive innovation in the space and offset the aforementioned loss of independence by Vendors?
- Paper distribution has been consistently declining over the last 4 years to be replaced by digital systems. Are paper statements in existence today exercises in Data Summarization? Why are our banking statements and our bills still so confusing and uninformative?
- In turn, with an encroaching demand from end-users to be able to do real-time analytics and trending of their own personal data, why are banks so slow to spice up their online banking systems? Are new sites like Mint.com and QuickenOnline setting a new standard in personal finance analytics?
- How much longer will we wait for the higher activities of analysis? Is the next step in BI Tools that aid in decision making process rather than just visualization? Can "actions" exposed by these new BI Tools be contextually relevant and drive specific end-results, such as yield competitive advantage?
- Volume of data is now manageable. Tools that are making sense of this volume are driving innovation.
- Is the notion of Business Intelligence simply too constrained to fully encompass possibilities? Are we transitioning to a more general-purpose, behavioral, Collective Intelligence that enables an organization to tap into data previously unaccessible or simply discarded? Can this aid an organization's process of innovation and feed competitive advantage?
- Is it possible to phase out manual Knowledge Management along with paper distribution and plugin in systems that interpret data on a Semantic level?
- Are Personalization of Services and Individual Privacy on opposing sides? Are the notions of privacy on the Internet and a Corporate Intranet so drastic that most innovation in Collective Intelligence will, in fact, occur on the Intranet where Individual Privacy is a more manageable Can of Worms?
- Truth: There are lots more data sources of interest than what is currently accessible on the internet
- Truth: Improving on what computers tend to do well does not necessarily result in value to the end-user
- Truth: Audio processing is more difficult than Video processing
- Trend: Use of Voice and Video as datasources is a new frontier. We wonder how much of it is native analysis vs metadata processing.
- Trend: More real-time decision-making at the hands of the user.
- Trend: Enterprise environment will give way to enterprise community.
- Trend: Web2.0 Collaborative tools are becoming more accepted in the enterprise as both the enterprises and the vendors mature
- Truth: There are lots more data sources of interest than what is currently accessible on the internet
- Truth: Improving on what computers tend to do well does not necessarily result in value to the end-user
- Truth: Audio processing is more difficult than Video processing
- Trend: Use of Voice and Video as datasources is a new frontier. We wonder how much of it is native analysis vs metadata processing
- Trend: More real-time decision-making at the hands of the user.
SAP Business Objects folks will be joining us to help us explore Xcelsius, their new analytics tool. They will also speak to the rest of the near-future product road-map. Details are available on the http://nybimeetup.org site.
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