In 1986, the concept of delivering a system using Personal Computers that accessed massive amounts of relevant information optimized to allow senior executives to graphically drill through information to quickly gain insight from trustworthy information was borne.
While we have made great inroads and progress, greatly expanded the audience for consuming information optimized for analysis and greatly improved the stability and performance of Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing systems, we are still aimed at the same target.
Twenty years ago, the thought of publishing information optimized for analysis was sufficient and the underlying data was extremely simple in structure. Because data was organized very simply, our ability to react to our client's needs was swift. Today this is not longer true. Our data models are complex, the volumes of data we are handling is growing to astronomic levels, and the underlying technologies utilized to fine tune a highly optimized 24 x 7 data environment obtaining data round the clock has different challenges than we dealt with 20 years ago.
Our organizational stewards have had tremendous patience for us to get this right, all they want is high availability of trustworthy, relevant data that they can quickly navigate, quickly gain insight and take swift decisive fact based action backed by trustworthy just in time data.
In order for you to deliver trustworthy, relevant data, you must first understand which data is relevant and which data is important only from a historical trivia perspective. It is important to not get rid of data that is deemed historical trivia, but to manage it through an information lifecycle.
If you can deliver a framework that provides fact based insight on data that is strategically relevant, trustworthy and timely, your organizational stewards will pay attention.
Are you up to the challenge?
We are embarking on what is being coined BI 2.0, with a new underlying architecture to eliminate the patch improvements made to a framework devised over twenty years ago.
The challenges requiring a revamping of the architecture are:
The underlying data has grown significantly from when the concept of slice and dice was devised.
The number of sources and process used to deliver an integrated single source of the truth has become sufficiently complex to slow down the process to add new information, and has made the ability for people to understand the lineage of information published for deriving swift fact based actions much more difficult.
The tools we have wired together into a comprehensive solution have become complex, making interfacing required for porting data needed for new business challenges much more difficult.
The Internet really has changed everything, it changed the expectations of our stakeholders that the delivery of integrated information is easy.
It is only easy if you publish and not integrate. Of course the promise we made twenty years ago, which is still on the books, calls for us to integrate information.
Your first challenge is to ensure that you understand what data is required, ensure a high degree of quality in required information, and continually refine (not add) data available which results in relevant, trustworthy information.
Your second challenge is to deliver this relevant data through a framework that assists in deriving fact based insight usable for taking action. It must be executable within the timelines your organizational stewards have for acting on opportunities and threats in the marketplace.
Read on for ideas on how to tackle your information challenge.
