What’s Wrong with BI
Nothing and everything. We just forgot what the concept truly means.
“BI people produce reliable dashboards.” — the sad status quo of BI according to random voices from the internet
“How do you think the future of Business Intelligence (BI) will look?” An innocent question at first sight. But since I was asked that exact question a couple of weeks ago, I can’t stop thinking about its implications.
It’s not that I don’t have a good answer; I think a lot of us agree on the general direction; it’s that I see the need for big changes, both on the sides of companies and on the side of builders of BI tools. It’s those implications that brought me here to write his piece.
Let’s wind back a bit: I believe BI, in its current state, is a far cry from what we need it to be, even today. The industry has developed a narrow focus on ultimately delivering tabular data to graphical tools. All of the backbone of ETL or ELT is based on that premise.
Nothing wrong with that, right? Rolf Potts, in his travel book Vagabonding, describes how we once walked the Philippine port of Cebu trying to locate an ATM machine. He made use of the native's half-baked English skills by asking yes-and-no questions.
