We enjoyed a pleasant surprise this week in the form of a new Forrester report that named Kyield as one of the interviews. The topic and content was certainly appropriate for introducing Kyield to Forrester clients:
Future of BI: Top Ten Business Intelligence Predictions for 2012, by Boris Evelson and Anjali Yakkundi with Stephen Powers and Shannon Coyne.
I have reviewed the brief paper, finding that I am in substantial agreement with the direction and predictions so I recommend the product, and I wanted to share a few additional thoughts.
One of the main themes in the report concerns expanding the use of BI throughout the organization, which essentially follows a proven management philosophy and strategy I have advocated my entire career due to a combination of logic, experience, and testing in many real-life cases. In a broad sense this issue speaks to organizational awareness, or as too often has been the case; the lack thereof.
Whether missed opportunity or crisis prevention, the problem is not that organizations do not contain essential knowledge for good decision making—or even that accurate predictions are not transferred to digital form—indeed experience shows that digital red flags are commonly found that were appropriate, accurate, and in many cases followed rational policy. Rather, in the super majority of cases a combination of obstacles prevented the critical issues from reaching and/or influencing decision makers. It required more than a dozen years for related technologies to evolve and mature to the point of allowing our system to resolve this and other critical issues in near-real time, but that day has finally come.
I found it interesting that the paper acknowledges that BI has serious limitations, and that the next generation of technologies may turn traditional BI relationships “upside down”, to include business alignment. The Forrester team also warns clients about excessive control and the need for balance. Indeed our patented system provides fully adaptable modules to tailor to the specific mission and needs of the individual, group, and organization. Each organization requires the ability to tailor differentiation in easy to use modules based on standards that are cost efficient and adaptable for continual improvement.
Other highlights in the paper point to the benefits of a semantic layer based on standards and a well-deserved warning to avoid consultants and integrators who “love the old-fashioned BI” as it can result in “unending billable hours”. Of course this problem is not limited to just BI—a serious problem across the enterprise ecosystem that has resulted in a unified defense against any innovation that reduces costs and improves efficiency, leading to ‘lock-in’ and low levels of innovation in the enterprise.
Unfortunately for those who rely on inefficient systems and misalignment of interests, technology advances have come together with economic necessity at roughly the same time to form an inflection point at the confluence of organizational management and neural networks. That is to say that our internal R&D as well as considerable external evidence is in strong agreement with the advice the Forrester team provides clients in this report, including to “start embracing some of the latest BI trends — or risk falling behind”. That risk is currently significant, expanding quickly in 2012 and will no doubt impact outcomes for the foreseeable future. -MM
