The criteria IT uses to buy BI has shifted, resulting in a new approach to BI decision-making. The era of high risk, complex and time consuming implementations is giving way to a new era of quick BI wins defined by specific business use-cases that are implemented in days, not months or years, with no CAPEX spending and extremely fast time-to-value. At PivotLink we’re seeing this shift in buying criteria being driven by both IT and the line of business.  IT needs to deliver a faster turnaround on BI solutions for high priority business projects and do so with limited resources. SaaS BI is a perfect augmentation strategy for legacy BI implementations. By enabling IT to better support the business with highly secure, easy-to-use tools and right-time data – all  without breaking the bank or bringing on new resources - SaaS BI is the best tool for these high value quick BI wins!

Distributed data management is driving the need for SaaS based BI in the cloud. The panel talked extensively about a reality that most companies face today – managing data that sits both outside their firewalls and inside their on-premise applications. BI in the cloud is the natural place to integrate and analyze data for SaaS to SaaS applications and SaaS to on-premise applications. A good example is the use of SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, and Taleo for sales and human capital management as well as on-premise ERP for financial and other business applications. The sales and manufacturing executives gain deeper insight into demand forecasting from the mash-up of data from the sales pipeline system (SFDC) with data from the on-premise ERP system. Similarly, the marketing leader gains a 360 degree view of marketing campaign effectiveness across lead generation and cost per lead from the mash-up of data from SFDC with data from Marketo with data from on-premise financial systems.

Enterprise 2.0 increases and accelerates collaboration across companies, supply chains and business partners. SaaS BI allows companies to break down silos across departments and strengthen relationships with trading partners by sharing insight, not just data. Outdoor retailer REI uses PivotLink to share analytics and dashboards within their ecosystem of vendors in order to minimize stock-out situations. This is a good example of how Enterprise 2.0 capabilities can bring people and content together quickly, integrate them into existing business processes and drive faster decision-making across an organization’s value chain.

Insight as a Service is the new BI greenfield. The need to turn reams of data into actionable business information has never been more imperative because dynamic insight and decision-making are so fundamental to achieving quick BI wins. Insight as a Service (IaaS) provides a faster, easier and more cost-effective way for business users to securely access relevant data, develop insight and achieve quick BI wins – all within the same application environment. To that end, PivotLink has developed pre-built analytical applications based on industry best practices and KPI’s. These solutions accelerate time to insight by delivering the data and metrics business users need to their desktop.

The old dog will not hunt in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 world. The panel had complete consensus on the fact that the traditional BI stack (complex and cumbersome star schemas, cubes, OLAP tools, heavy handed ETL) cannot effectively suport the new world order of dynamic decision-making, collaboration, distributed data management and quick BI wins. The Enterprise 2.0 world embraces change and thrives on the vast amounts and types of information streaming into the enterprise. This trend (which is quickly becoming the new normal) exposes companies to even more data sources that shift how data maps and relates to one another – which directly impacts the tools and decision-making processes end users require to be effective.

Overall, it was a great session and highlighted the market’s need for truly innovative technology approaches to business intelligence – ones that deliver on the promise of fast implementations, end user self-service and unburdening IT.  And as you can imagine, since PivotLink has pioneered a unique columnar database, a no-transformation-required ETL engine and lightening fast in-memory analytics, I couldn’t agree more with the rest of the panel on this matter!

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 !