WHITE PAPER

The Next Generation of BI

Abstract
The term Business Intelligence 2.0 (BI 2.0) is cropping up more and more in the industry,
generally referring to the next generation of BI just as Web 2.0 has come to refer to the
next generation of the Web. The focus, like Web 2.0, is on people, empowering users to
express their creativity, allowing them to freely access information and produce something
meaningful from it while focusing on information sharing, communication, and collaboration.

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Contents

Executive Summary ..................................................................................................... 3

What is the Relationship of BI 2.0 to Web 2.0?............................................................. 3
How Is BI Changing?................................................................................................ 3
Trends toward Realizing BI 2.0 ...................................................................................... 5
Democratizing BI ..................................................................................................... 5
Interactive and Actionable BI via the Web for Anyone, Anywhere ................................ 5
Empowered Users ................................................................................................ 5
Dynamic, Interactive and Personalized Access to Information ..................................... 6
Collaborative BI ................................................................................................... 6
Embedded Search Capabilities ............................................................................... 6
New Ways of Packaging and Delivering Content and BI Capabilities................................. 7
Action-based, Event-Driven Information and Integrated BI Capabilities............................ 7
More Affordable Analysis Capabilities with and without OLAP .......................................... 8
More Affordable Alternatives for Providing Data for Analysis ........................................... 9
Innovations in Licensing and Pricing Models ............................................................... 10
So, What Is BI 2.0? ................................................................................................... 10

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Executive Summary
The term Business Intelligence 2.0 (BI 2.0) is cropping up more and more in the
industry, generally referring to the next generation of BI just as Web 2.0 has come to
refer to the next generation of the Web. The focus, like Web 2.0, is on people,
empowering users to express their creativity, allowing them to freely access information
and produce something meaningful from it while focusing on information sharing,
communication, and collaboration.

Static, printable reports created by an overburdened IT staff and delivered as pages and
pages of tabular data have certainly come a long way. Today’s business users want
options when they get business information; they want accurate, real-time information;
they want to interactively touch and visualize information; they want to be able to make
changes to reports immediately; they want anytime, anywhere access to that
information; and, they want to easily share that information with others.

The widespread availability of business applications on the Web has actually boosted the
need for better BI tools and more interactive capabilities. It opens the door to allowing
many users, who otherwise may not have had access, to get at valuable information,
bringing the power of BI to the everyday user. This also encourages more information
sharing among employees, managers, partners, analysts, clients, suppliers/vendors;
that is, any business user in the enterprise.

Naturally, the next generation of BI will focus more on collaboration, empowering users,
and easily reaching the masses of users across the organization.

W h a t Is th e R el a tio n sh i p o f B I 2 .0 to W e b 2.0 ?

Just as Web 2.0 generally emphasizes online collaboration, empowered end users and
enabling technologies like XML, RSS, and AJAX, these all play a part in BI 2.0. The term
BI 2.0 is reserved to refer to the next generation of BI itself and the BI-specific
technology and features that it encompasses.

How Is BI Changing?

BI has typically been used to present data so that report consumers can try to figure out
what happened after the fact. Reports deliver the facts about what has happened to help
employees see the overall health and status of the business. Analysis lets them further
explore that data to determine trends or uncover root causes of successes and failures.

In addition to making BI, reporting and analysis more interactive and more usable and
more available across the enterprise, the next generation of BI also will be about
identifying and taking action on an area of concern as issues arise.

To become more ‘intelligent’ and remain competitive, organizations need to understand

the whole picture: the current state of their business as well as where it’s been and
where it’s headed. This information can only be gleaned through a combination of
reporting and analysis both via corporate reports developed by technical users and
delivered to personnel across the organization and via ad hoc analysis that is performed
on demand by any business user to answer unpredictable and immediate questions.
Optimally, organizations would be able to tap into their information wherever it is in the
organization using tools that take advantage of the latest technologies and are fully
Web-based for wider enterprise reach and availability.

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Before, BI was about…
Static consumption of reports
Pushing and presenting static reports to users
High-cost, luxury function of the organization
BI for a few specialized users
Print-oriented reports
Charting with static bar and pie charts
OLAP for analysis
Complex and time-consuming installation,
deployment, upgrade and use
Desktop-based or static HTML reports
Desktop, Active-X and smart client reporting
applications
Pre-defined search parameters
Structured data
After-the-fact analysis due to data latency
Per user software licensing
Disparate and separately packaged BI
components
COPYRIGHT © 2006 LOGIXML, INC.
Now, BI 2.0 is about…
Dynamic user communities, active collaboration
and immediate information sharing
Delivery of dynamic, Interactive information plus
users building their own reports or subscribing to
the information they want
Cost-effective solutions available across the
enterprise
BI for everyone in the organization as needed
Web-based, interactive reporting applications
Intuitive, dynamic and interactive data
visualization
OLAP in addition to other innovative, less
complex yet high performing alternatives for
data analysis and ad hoc reporting
Simple and easy installation, deployment,
upgrade and use
Reports integrated with events and automated
processes, reports as Web Services (via XML)
Pure Web-based applications with rich user
environments and highly interactive user
interfaces
Dynamic or free-style searches and data
exploration
Broader set of supported data types including
unstructured data and XML Web Services as
well as mash-ups of this content
Real-time and near real-time reporting and
analysis for critical, operational problem-solving
Per server licensing for unlimited users or
subscription-based licensing
Complete BI feature sets and functionality
delivered on an open, unified platform
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Trends toward Realizing BI 2.0

D e mo cra ti zi n g BI

BI 2.0 will bring everybody to the game, not just executives and power users. BI can
take advantage of various technologies and techniques like AJAX, RSS, content
mashups, search, and Web collaboration, among others to simplify the entire approach
to BI, to add significantly more value to more users across the enterprise.

Interactive and Actionable BI via the Web for Anyone, Anywhere

Corporate employees today expect dynamic, interactive business applications on the

Web. They want to get at their business information whenever and wherever they need
it. Delivering pure Web-based BI provides this universal accessibility and availability.

A paradigm shift must occur in how businesses view reporting. Traditional BI solutions
use an out-dated ‘paper’-oriented approach, asking the user to select a print layout each
time they create a new report. They are still stuck in the mindset of static, printed
reports. BI must look at information delivery and consumption purely from a Web
perspective, taking advantage of all the interactive features offered by the Web. This
includes giving users the option to print reports when needed but, more importantly,
giving them the ability to interact with and even change their report layouts
dynamically, on-the-fly.

From an IT perspective, the only requirement for using a purely Web-based application
is a standard Web browser on any platform with a connection to the Internet. Users
should not required to download client software, plug-ins or ActiveX, for example. Pure
Web-based BI applications, which are based on open standards, also work with all major
data sources without being biased toward a particular data server.

Web-based applications also can be seamlessly upgraded in one central location for all
users, providing significant IT resource savings. All the traditional issues with upgrading
BI software, including the complexity and extra effort required to upgrade various pieces
of BI client software on various upgrade schedules, are unacceptable in the BI 2.0 world.

Empowered Users

BI must focus on making business tools available to more employees through role-based
tools and interfaces that are easier to use. Users should be able to easily search for the
information they need, create and design their own reports, collaborate with others,
tailor their layouts to see the information they want to see, and so on. Users should also
be able to subscribe to information that they want, using RSS, for example. This
technology can easily be extended to BI, allowing users to subscribe to receive auto-
updates of relevant information, for example, when a report has changed or when a user
annotates a report to stay abreast of the changing state of the business.

Such a self-service approach puts the power of BI right into the hands of your business
users, gives immediate answers since they do not have to wait for IT to build reports,
and takes the burden away from IT departments who no longer need to waste time in
formatting and constantly changing reports for the users they serve. IT resources can be
better focused on more important business tasks like configuring automated workflows,
scalability, and information availability.

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Dynamic, Interactive and Personalized Access to Information

Traditionally, BI tools have been reserved for a few power users or analysts within the
organization, and the associated interfaces have been criticized for being overly complex
and less than usable. Various technologies can be applied to improve the entire user
experience in BI tools, including:

• Flash and AJAX-enabled user interfaces, which offer more seamless interactivity and
dynamic updates on-the-fly. AJAX technology enables a highly usable, rich user
experience like that of a desktop application.
• Innovative and more powerful data visualization tools that more easily show patterns
and trends (heat maps are a great example) and allow users to interact with data,
focusing on patterns or drilling down to details, and so on, on-the-fly (which can be
achieved using technologies like AJAX)
• Accessibility for the myriad of mobile devices currently available
• Personalization with “my-page” type layouts and role-based access to relevant
information

Collaborative BI

In today’s world of email, chat and blogs, business users expect the ability to
communicate with other users and share information immediately. What better area to
apply these collaborative techniques that in corporate BI to better reach and engage the
masses of users. And, collaborative techniques can offer side benefits to IT and BI
application developers. With broader use and improved collaboration, BI applications will
get better and better, since users can provide direct feedback and actively participate in
improving delivery of information and making it most relevant to their needs and roles.

BI 2.0 solutions can easily take advantage of various collaboration mechanisms allowing
users to:

• Annotate reports by adding comments on the fly or attaching notes

• Participate in and contribute to on-demand discussions as well as navigate and search
threaded discussions
• Provide recommendations, ratings and feedback
• Create, send and automate notifications and alerts about data in reports
• Create, schedule and email reports to both BI and non-BI users as needed

Embedded Search Capabilities

IDC Analyst, Dan Vesset, observes in a September 2006 feature article in Software
Magazine, “… one of the big emerging BI trends is providing access to more users within
the organization, not just to the analysts who have been the traditional users of BI. As
the user population grows, new interfaces will be required to help out those ’less
analytic’ users to gain access to BI data.”

In the Google era, search and BI are getting closer and closer to each other. Search is
becoming increasingly important in BI for providing a simple way for users to get
answers to business questions within both structured and unstructured corporate data
(that is, content from email, images, video files, discussion forums, blogs, and so on) as
well as existing BI and report data.

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In addition to traditional pre-defined parameters that allow users to narrow down

searches for information, the next generation of BI will begin to see more dynamic and
free-style, casual search capabilities like users have come to expect in their browsers.
Search in BI certainly supports the missive of reaching the masses of users, helping
extend easy information access to a broader user community.

N ew Wa ys o f Pa ckag in g a nd De li ve ri n g C on te n t a nd BI C a p ab il iti e s

To most effectively reach more users, BI features and functionality must be built on an
open, pure Web-based industry standard platform that lets developers quickly and easily
integrate them into business applications.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables distributed software to work together

based on standard interfaces, reducing the cost of deployment and integration. Web
Services is a method of designing applications so that, rather than running as a
standalone piece of code on one system, their functions can be made available as
“services” for any server or application linked to the network. When properly
implemented, this makes it easier to share information among multiple systems.

According to Paul Hulford in an April 2006 article published in DM Review, “BI solutions
need to leverage these technologies to bridge the gaps between relational and
multidimensional sources, using standard protocols to connect platforms, servers,
information and people…enabling applications to be platform neutral and technology
agnostic…and providing services with high levels of scalability and reliability.”

He further states, “The most notable advance in BI architecture is the Web, which has
driven several standards that are now part of mainstream network environments. Many
companies have implemented these standards - TCP/IP, HTTP, simple object access
protocol (SOAP), WSDL, XML and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) - because
they are available and reliable…The end result is an open, extensible platform for
building and delivering BI in a dynamic and distributed environment.

SOA and Web Services can provide new ways of packaging and delivering valuable
content and BI capabilities. They make it easy to implement BI services across all
functional areas of the business. BI solutions can also take advantage of SOAP and XML
features like open standards and platform independence. And, reports can actually be
viewed as Web Services using XML rather than HTML, making full interactivity in reports
a reality.

A c ti o n -b a se d , E ve n t- D r i ve n In for m a tio n a nd In te g r a ted B I C a pa bi l i tie s

BI is moving from just delivering information and enabling analysis to actually

automating repeatable, operational activities. BI will be also be used to analyze business
processes.

This requires integration of BI into everyday business processes with BI functionality

embedded in operational applications. There are various ways to realize this process-
centric, automated decision-making, and actionable BI to include implementation of
event-driven architectures and Web Services. BI output will need to be ‘integrate-able’
in any other business applications, for example using Web Services via HTTP.

Action-based information allows your BI information to not just end at the delivery of a
report. You should be able to put BI right in the middle of your application and take
immediate action. For example, if you start with a dashboard chart that shows a problem

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with inventory levels, you can drill-down to find details about the product, and then
navigate to a form to order more inventory immediately.

An event-driven architecture enables business users to gain real-time insight into how their
business processes are performing across the enterprise and to respond to errors and
conditions as they occur. Therefore, users do not have to wait for reports to be delivered to
discover critical issues. They can find out as the issue is discovered and take immediate
action.

According to a Gartner Spotlight article, The Growing Role of Events in Enterprise Applications
(http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=116129),

“…the concept of events … is the key underlying factor that will enable certain
revolutionary improvements in business processes and application systems
during the next five years. Strategies that are being promoted using labels such
as the zero-latency enterprise, the real-time enterprise, the event-driven
enterprise and On Demand computing cannot be fully realized without event-
driven design. Applications developed during the next 10 years will make more
use of events than those developed in the previous 50 years.”

Automated alerts and notifications allow users to receive critical business information in
the quickest possible time. For example, a store manager can be automatically informed
when a certain product's sales fall below or rise above a specified range or if inventory
levels are critically low, an alert can be sent to the appropriate line manager to take
appropriate action.

This can be further automated with events that actually trigger a process to order more
inventory, removing the need for human intervention, if needed. Automatic process
scheduling, for example, scheduling report delivery, helps streamline information
delivery as well as can help optimize the running of many reports on the network, for
example, during off-peak hours. Automatic export (for example to PDF) and delivery of a
report to specific subscribed users on a regularly scheduled basis is also helpful. For
example, if sales managers need a weekly sales report, the report can be scheduled,
created, and delivered every Monday at 9:00 AM.

More Affordabl e Analysi s Capabi l i ties wi th and w i thout OLAP

Analysis and ad hoc reporting have historically been all about OLAP. In BI 2.0, there are
more options for analysis, and data cubes are not the only way to empower data
analysis and ad hoc reporting. Because more powerful processors are now available that
are extremely affordable helps to make these alternatives a reality.

With this trend, in-memory processing is possible to enable increased speed and
flexibility for report processing and analysis by loading detailed data into memory. This
provides users with increased response times for analyzing critical business
information . This is enhanced even further by 64-bit platforms, which can provide
exponentially more processing power than 32-bit processors.

As BI becomes more important to organizations and those organizations conduct more

and more complex data analysis, faster processors become increasingly necessary. For
example, if you have a complex sales report that must sort through thousands of
combinations of product categories and locations, memory requirements and limitations
can make it impossibly slow to analyze such data.

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The key benefits for BI offered by 64-bit support include:

• Better performance and faster processing for data-intensive tasks and complex
computations and calculations, for example, like that required for OLAP
• Use of more system memory so that applications can run faster when working with large
data sets.
• Ability to better handle massive data volumes
• Increased real-time speed
• Larger caching for improved database performance

M o r e A ffo rd a bl e A l te rn a ti ve s fo r P r o vi d in g D a ta fo r An a l ys i s
More Agile, Cost-effective and BI-Optimized Data Availability

As BI more broadly spreads throughout the enterprise rather than focused solely around
the data warehouse, new solutions are required that bring data from disparate sources
together easily and quickly so that it’s ready for consumption by BI users outside of the
traditional data warehouse.

Also, as BI becomes more available to the small to mid-size organizations and more
innovative pricing models for BI solutions arise, organizations will need options for data
availability that can be quickly deployed, require little maintenance and are extremely
affordable.

Some users will want to run queries directly on operational data. In addition, with the
concept of operational BI, data must be analyzed before it even gets to the data
warehouse. Therefore, real-time availability solutions will be required. And still, some
users will want to take advantage of data warehousing features like caching, data
integration, and pre-calculated, pre-aggregated data that is optimized for reporting
without investing in the time and complexity of an entire data warehouse
implementation. Innovative alternatives are required like "easy marts,” which can
provide easy to implement, easy to maintain as well as scalable and high-performing
data storage for BI information to meet specific needs.

Dashboards, the View into your Organization’s BI

Personalized, easy-to-use dashboards and scorecards will become more and more
important to the enterprise, acting as the vehicle to deliver on-demand BI enterprise-
wide. Dashboards are already becoming a standard requirement of corporate users’ BI
initiatives. This is due to the ease of use, and the convenient and fast access to critical
data that they provide.

Dashboards can also be used to display mash-ups of content to visualize data that is
spread across the enterprise in disparate applications. Technologies like AJAX make it
easy to build rich interfaces for bringing together data from inside and outside
enterprises in one place and combining external data in XML with internal data.

Dashboards are valuable because they transform business data into information that’s
easy to comprehend; users can view and make sense of this information at-a-glance as
well as interact with it as needed. According to Wayne Eckerson, the Director of
Research and Services for the Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), “Performance
Dashboards are the solution our industry has been waiting for for three decades.
Performance Dashboards are the new face of BI.”

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Effective dashboards must include the ability to:

• Give real-time performance status and provide quick access to critical information and
the current state of the business
• Provide at-a-glance graphical views to monitor status of many areas of the business in
one location
• Allow users, at the click of the mouse, to drill-down and get more detailed information to
investigate error conditions, determine root causes or follow hunches
• Alert users when certain conditions are met, providing warnings, next steps, summaries,
need for action alerts, and so on to correct negative trends
• Provide customized ‘views’ based on role so that users can only see the data that is
most relevant to their roles and to which they have access
• Provide personalized views that let users decide what information they want to see—
letting users customize the page and layout, select their own reports and metrics, move
charts and gauges around, add or remove charts, and so on, as they see fit.

In n o va ti ons i n L i ce n sin g a nd Prici n g Mo de ls

Traditionally, BI was a specialty function, a luxury solution reserved for larger

corporations and a special set of users in the organization with licensing based on the
number of users. BI solutions have also been extremely expensive to purchase,
implement, and deploy.

With BI 2.0, the time of million-dollar BI implementations is over. More affordable

solutions and even open source approaches to BI are changing the face of traditional
pricing models and further extending the benefits of BI to the masses of users.

Innovative server-based or subscription-based licensing models clearly offer companies

a more affordable alternative. The benefits of server-based pricing (for example, per
processor) with unlimited users are themselves unlimited. With this pricing model, the
organization saves significant dollars, increases BI availability across the organization as
well as reduces IT complexity for maintaining and keeping track of user licenses. This
model is much easier to manage from an IT perspective, since you won’t have to keep
track of how many user licenses you need to add or how many you’ve paid for but aren’t
currently using.

In a September 2006 Enterprise Systems article, Wayne Eckerson, from TDWI, predicts
that “… server-based licensing and subscription pricing models are the wave of the
future. Thin client Web-based computing has made it possible to run everything off the
server without installing client software, which takes away the ‘physicality’ of user-based
pricing. If you are committed to a product and it helps run a portion of your business, a
server-based license makes sense,” he comments. “Then again, subscription based
pricing makes even more sense. You only pay for what you use—sometimes by user or
server or [sometimes] not—on a monthly basis. You can always downsize or upsize at
any time without changing your software...”

So, What Is BI 2.0?

It’s a term that is naturally growing to describe the next generation of BI. It represents
a collection of innovative, dynamic, adaptable and collaborative technology approaches,
BI functionality, and licensing models that will truly bring BI to the masses, making
information available anytime, anywhere to anyone.

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