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The term Business Intelligence 2.0 (BI 2.0) is cropping up more and more in the industry, generally referring to the next generation of BI just as Web 2.0 has come to refer to the next generation of the Web. The focus, like Web 2.0, is on people, empowering users to express their creativity, allowing them to freely access information and produce something meaningful from it while focusing on information sharing, communication, and collaboration.
Static, printable reports created by an overburdened IT staff and delivered as pages and pages of tabular data have certainly come a long way. Today?s business users want options when they get business information; they want accurate, real-time information; they want to interactively touch and visualize information; they want to be able to make changes to reports immediately; they want anytime, anywhere access to that information; and, they want to easily share that information with others.
The widespread availability of business applications on the Web has actually boosted the need for better BI tools and more interactive capabilities. It opens the door to allowing many users, who otherwise may not have had access, to get at valuable information, bringing the power of BI to the everyday user. This also encourages more information sharing among employees, managers, partners, analysts, clients, suppliers/vendors; that is, any business user in the enterprise.
Naturally, the next generation of BI will focus more on collaboration, empowering users, and easily reaching the masses of users across the organization.
What Is the Relationship of BI 2.0 to Web 2.0?
Just as Web 2.0 generally emphasizes online collaboration, empowered end users and enabling technologies like XML, RSS, and AJAX, these all play a part in BI 2.0. The term BI 2.0 is reserved to refer to the next generation of BI itself and the BI-specific technology and features that it encompasses.
How Is BI Changing?
BI has typically been used to present data so that report consumers can try to figure out what happened after the fact. Reports deliver the facts about what has happened to help employees see the overall health and status of the business. Analysis lets them further explore that data to determine trends or uncover root causes of successes and failures.
In addition to making BI, reporting and analysis more interactive and more usable and more available across the enterprise, the next generation of BI also will be about identifying and taking action on an area of concern as issues arise.
To become more ?intelligent? and remain competitive, organizations need to understand the whole picture: the current state of their business as well as where it?s been and where it?s headed. This information can only be gleaned through a combination of reporting and analysis both via corporate reports developed by technical users and delivered to personnel across the organization and via ad hoc analysis that is performed on demand by any business user to answer unpredictable and immediate questions. Optimally, organizations would be able to tap into their information wherever it is in the organization using tools that take advantage of the latest technologies and are fully Web-based for wider enterprise reach and availability.
Democratizing BI
BI 2.0 will bring everybody to the game, not just executives and power users. BI can take advantage of various technologies and techniques like AJAX, RSS, content mashups, search, and Web collaboration, among others to simplify the entire approach to BI, to add significantly more value to more users across the enterprise.
Interactive and Actionable BI via the Web for Anyone, Anywhere
Corporate employees today expect dynamic, interactive business applications on the Web. They want to get at their business information whenever and wherever they need it. Delivering pure Web-based BI provides this universal accessibility and availability.
A paradigm shift must occur in how businesses view reporting. Traditional BI solutions use an out-dated ?paper?-oriented approach, asking the user to select a print layout each time they create a new report. They are still stuck in the mindset of static, printed reports. BI must look at information delivery and consumption purely from a Web perspective, taking advantage of all the interactive features offered by the Web. This includes giving users the option to print reports when needed but, more importantly, giving them the ability to interact with and even change their report layouts dynamically, on-the-fly.
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