PivotLink’s vision for the New BI intends to create a business world where everyone is empowered – especially business users who are ultimately responsible for the decisions and outcomes made using enterprise data. Of the many conversations I had with attendees and analysts, several points stood out in support of our vision for the New BI:

1. Business users are yearning for tools that will allow them to explore and analyze their data independently without waiting for IT
2. IT won’t resist something that makes business users more effective while reducing their workload
3. The New BI will help build a bridge between IT and the line of business thereby driving rapid cultural changes

While the majority of the Gartner crowd is still ensconced in on-premise BI solutions, there is increasing interest in and shift towards SaaS BI as well as other next-gen solutions like mobile BI. In my opinion, this is being driven by business users who are starting to have a greater influence in the BI buying process and who have a greater need for analytics as part of their day-to-day work activities. Bill Hostman’s Monday morning keynote spoke about how IT needs to get closer to the business and help define top level metrics for organizational performance, while linking those metrics to the operational metrics that are used every day to run the company. Howard Dresner’s Tuesday afternoon keynote touched on similar themes. From his persepctive, business intelligence tools are going from being in the hands of a few to the hands of many and this will eventually create stronger “cultures of performance” in organizations. He also commented on how innovations in the UI and cloud computing are allowing the industry to finally deliver on the promise of insight for everyone.

Several other analysts and sessions called out the future of BI. Specifically, Rita L. Sallam’s two sessions entitled Achieving the Holy Grail of BI through Collaborative Decision Making and Defining your BI Platform mentioned SaaS BI as a compelling and viable option. Whit Andrew’s session on BI and the Google Generation: Searching for New Ways to Analyze Information gave a glimpse into the UI of the future – which will look a lot different than they do today. This session reminded me of an earlier post I wrote which highlighted the notion that “your grandfather’s BI” will likely fall short of meeting the needs of an emerging workforce raised on You Tube, Twitter, Google and the iPhone.

All in all it was a great conference. I was excited by the wide range of practitioners who took an interest in learning about PivotLink’s SaaS BI and their ensuing desire to figure out how to bring the New BI into their organizations. There is no doubt in my mind that the BI industry is about to experience alot of change. And PivotLink will be there leading the way!!

Did you attend the conference? What sessions and conversations sparked your interest? Did you walk away with a great tip or strategy to approach things differently? Let us know.

The New BI is in the cloud and benefits from the inherent advantages of this computing model (affordable, agile, quickly deployable, high bandwidth, “always on”, extend more kinds of data to more users). Most importantly, the New BI isn’t shackled behind the four walls of an organization. It goes well beyond and helps individuals extend their network far and fast enough to get timely insights and answers to their operational and strategic questions. The New BI goes beyond analysis and reporting and ventures into the realm of true collaborative decision making. Web 2.0 social tools wrapped around the New BI have the ability to quickly collect and spread knowledge, connect people who would otherwise have remained unaware of each other, harness their collective intelligence and enhance individual decision making.

Three key forces are driving the trend towards the New BI: 1) the explosion of  more and various types of information in our day-to-day work lives, 2) a new generation of digitally savvy employees and 3) a blurring of the distinction between technology used in our personal and our work lives. With dynamic flows of information coming at them each day, users need new ways to access and analyze it and then relate it to their decisions and actions. Secondly, those who grew up with personal technology – Millenials, Gen Y – are changing the culture of the workforce. The emerging workforce prefers information in multimedia to words, the collective intelligence of individuals and they rely upon online resources such as social networks, expert communities and bloggers for strategic information. As people become increasingly used to sharing and collaborating outside the office (e.g. Facebook, iPhone, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) they are coming to expect their work places to become more open and collaborative as well. Many companies today are organized into separate regional product-line and functional “silos”, making it hard for people to share information beyond their immediate colleagues. As a result valuable information and insight ends up being siloed or simply not shared. Even worse, opportunities for innovation don’t surface.

The New BI enables organizations to leverage information in valuable new ways including connecting employees who need information with the experts who have it, enabling the best ideas to emerge organically and using those ideas to catalyze innovation. As the New BI gains traction, it will transform the way companies organize and manage their information assets and ultimately empower individuals to re-design their decision making processes to make not only more timely decisions, but more confident and creative ones.

At PivotLink we give business people tools that allow them to access, aggregate and analyze the information they need to improve understanding and decision making and ultimately do their jobs better – without burdening IT.  PivotLink customers such as the North Face, DMA and OrderMotion have already had success with the New BI to speed up knowledge-sharing both internally and across the extended supply chain, in turn breaking down silos. The New BI is a more efficient and effective business intelligence paradigm. It is positioned to help users know more, do better and thrive. Stay tuned, it’s about to get really interesting !