BI is growing up

There's an interesting interview on CW today with the "father" of business intelligence, Howard Dresnar.  It's interesting to see what his thoughts are on BI now -- seventeen years after the concept became common knowledge. His perspective seems to be that BI is leading to BPM.  I think that goes without saying.  BI and BPM go hand in hand.  After all, you can't have business intelligence if you don't have intelligent business process management.

What's more interesting, though, is Dresner's take on what's been the biggest barrier to BI: the corporate culture. Corporate culture does tend to be the largest adoption hurdle for many different types of technology, but where BI is concerned, it's especially troublesome because information is considered such as asset that very often it's held close to the vest.  On top of that, management doesn't seem to understand the value of BI for the right purposes yet.

That's changing though.  The more companies use BI and find successful strategies for implementing and using the technology, the more business intelligence strategies and even technologies improve.  Still, the business problem that drives successful business intelligence is a difficult factor to pinpoint for many organizations.

Taken all together, you could say that business intelligence has matured but is not yet stable.  And not unstable in a way that it's here today, gone tomorrow.  Business intelligence is still evolving.  The current focus on integration BI with BPM is just another step in the evolution of business intelligence.  When the evolution is complete, we might be looking at an entire system, spanning the organization that seemlessly provides the right information at just the right time without any worries or babysitting from the IT department. 

We're already glimpsing the potential of BI in the successes of some organizations, but there's so much more that BI makes possible.  Over time, those additional benefits will be more and more obvious.  And the market will change, again and again.  What's certain is that even in its adolescence, BI is a mission critical technology.  And as it continues to evolve it will become more and more useful (and more and more comprehensive).