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A Brief History of BI—and Why It’s Still the Next Big Thing
Remember the late 1980s, when business intelligence (BI) was called decision-support systems (DSS) and the Next Big Thing was
Lotus 1-2-3?
A brief look back over the last two decades reveals exactly how integral BI has become to business decision-making—and why pioneering changes at Oracle are removing long-standing impediments to what has been dubbed “pervasive” BI.
Although the promise of BI has at times outstripped business realities, CIOs definitely feel that change is on the horizon. According to Gartner surveys of the last two years, BI is their No. 1 priority.
From Paper Ledgers to Terabytes
“Since the days when ‘cut-and-paste’ was cutting-edge, we’ve made huge strides in business intelligence,” says Howard Dresner, chief strategy officer at BI leader Hyperion, which was recently acquired by Oracle. “Anyone want to return to the business intelligence of 1985?”
The sheer power of computing has driven the growth of BI. In the late 1980s, a Fortune 500 company typically had hundreds of megabytes of business data. Today the same company probably contends with multiple terabytes—an exponential rise that amounts to 10,000-fold or even 100,000-fold growth.
The advent of the corporate database proved to be another key BI innovation, providing a single home for all potentially relevant data. The rapid evolution of extract, transform, load (ETL) and online analytical processing (OLAP) has, in turn, sped the transformation of that data into actionable information.
The advent of the internet was another major milestone, driving the idea of “real-time” decision-making. Ideally, internet-based business applications could capture data as soon as a transaction took place. That information would then be analyzed, with results and recommendations distributed instantly to decision-makers’ desktops.
Standardization of browsers and data manipulation languages (DMLs) brought this idea one step closer to reality. So did the rising importance of industry standards and enterprise application integration. Each helped consolidate diverse data, making it available—and meaningful—to a set of integrated BI tools.
Still, experts agree, major hurdles remained. Systems necessarily involved multiple vendors, introducing complexity that was costly and that resulted in data silos. Both startup and maintenance costs tended to be high. And cumbersome user interfaces (UIs) tended to maintain reporting as a function of the IT department—and thus a service reserved for high-level executives.
Overcoming Obstacles with Oracle Business Intelligence
Over the last several years, rapid and transformative developments at Oracle have changed the paradigm for BI delivery, removing significant obstacles in the process.
First, Oracle’s acquisition and integration of key BI leaders such as Hyperion and Siebel, along with substantial internal development, have resulted in a confluence of new BI and performance management products that are unprecedented in scope and functionality. Oracle now offers every element of a complete BI solution, including best-of-breed data warehousing, data integration, BI platform technology, operational BI applications, and financial performance management applications.
Oracle’s focus and investment in BI have not gone unnoticed. Including Hyperion, Oracle is the only vendor positioned in the Leaders quadrant for BI platforms, data warehousing, and corporate performance management suites, according to Gartner. IDC pegs Oracle as the world’s No. 1 provider of business analytics software worldwide, and a recent report by DataMonitor also rated Oracle as one of only two “shortlist” vendors for business intelligence.
In addition, a recent survey of IT professionals conducted by InformationWeek found that Oracle was now the No. 1 preferred vendor for business intelligence.
Pervasive BI: From Boardroom to the Front Line
Oracle’s current mission: to deliver “pervasive” BI through a complete, end-to-end enterprise performance management system.
The idea of pervasive BI is “not to deliver business intelligence in a bunch of reports,” says Paul Rodwick, vice president of Oracle BI Product Management, “but to deliver it to people in the ways they can use it, such as injecting it directly into the business transaction.”
That means “embedding business intelligence, so that people have all of that information right at their fingertips in the context of a transaction when they’re using the application,” says Jesper Andersen, Oracle senior vice president, Applications Strategy.
“We have made great strides in delivering intelligent workflow through SOA and Oracle BPEL Process Manager,” adds Phil Bates, architect, Oracle BI Product Development. “Integration of business intelligence with workflow processes enables organizations to optimize business processes and link insight to action.”
All of this enables Oracle to deliver on the vision of an end-to-end enterprise performance management system, bringing together financial performance management, business intelligence, and transactional applications into an integrated system for managing performance across all facets of a business.
Dresner, the father of the whole BI concept, has called this new paradigm “information democracy.”
“All user constituents have access to timely and relevant insight to help them manage their performance and better align them with the mission of the organization,” Dresner explains.
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