BI: Where you stand depends upon where you sit

Computerworld solicited opinions about the future of BI from a remarkable variety of expert industry participants, mainly vendors of products and services.  Their opinions, unsurprisingly, were very well aligned with their respective business strategies, and varied all over the place.  

My thoughts on a few of the major themes and points made include:

• BI should and will be integrated into operational apps in many areas.
• CRM is a leading app area in using BI/analytics.
• Classical ad-hoc BI will nonetheless grow in importance, often with a KPI-centric interface.
• Yes, management can push down a unified way of looking at numbers to focus employees' attention on them consistently, but that is an overhyped benefit of the technology.   Balanced scorecards are way overhyped.
• Integration of planning and BI is important.
• Integration of predictive analytics and BI is important too.
• Text mining is one of the biggest growth areas in BI, and has been for about five quarters now.
• The biggest BI/analytics product expenditures often are and will continue to be for data warehousing, operational apps, and above all storage.  Projecting the growth in pure BI product revenue is interesting mainly to vendors and investors.

and going by what wasn't said, it seems:

• Vendors still aren't facing up to the cultural problems of asking whole organizations of middle managers to change the way they do their decision-making.

If you page back, you'll see that I've blogged on almost all of these subjects over the past four months.

And finally:

• Lothar Schubert is absolutely right that better tools let one do things cheaper and faster AND let one do things that are new.  I've been saying that for decades, and I think he stole the line from me.  But with that cute metaphor, he phrased it far better than I EVER have.