Why ‘business analytics’ is the next big thing
As a long-time IT exec, I’ve seen the studies, listened to the sales pitches, questioned the case studies, and lived through the hype cycles. In organizations, there is a perceivable cycle that repeats itself -the current strategy is getting long in the tooth, so management searches for the next ‘thing’.
Someone in marketing recognizes a festering annoyance in a few leading organziations and coins a new phrase that others start to rally around. They know that management spends money to deal with festering annoyances, but they hate pouring money into the same thing, year after year after year. That is why it is so important for marketing to supply their new phrase with some nice sounding “differentiation”.
I remember the need for “reporting systems”, the fancier “decision support systems”, robust “data warehouses”, the more agile “data marts”, prestigious “executive information systems”, the all-encompassing “business intelligence” solutions. All of these were supposed to give management a better understanding of the business while dangling the elusive carrot of competitive advantage.
So that festering annoyance put business intelligence applications at the top of Gartner’s technology priority list for the third year in a row. Management is still not happy with the information they have available to them. They think they can get better reports, and will soon get tired of investing in the same old thing. The BI industry is in a really bad state to respond. The Big BI Consolidation has distracted all the wrong people, and there hasn’t been a lot of innovation to hook a new marketing phrase to.
We all know that the lack of a product would never stop a good marketing group, so is it any surprise that, after Google Analytics helped them understand their web site usage, they are identifying a bigger requirement for ‘business analytics’?
Business Intelligence is dead (as a phrase). Marketing is killing it. Long live business analytics.
Well, three years at least…
