Moving Towards Content Intelligence

Companies are moving from older definitions of business intelligence to new explanations that encompass not only business delivery, but also the ability to learn and understand the business in order to optimize performance and achieve efficiency, according to the experts.

“Personally I think BI (or at least the term BI) will disappear by the term 2010, much as OLAP has disappeared as a really useful term, and will be replaced by what we call ‘content intelligence’,” suggests Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst at Bloor Research, in an interview with Business Management. “What we’re moving towards is more a mix and match of unstructured and structured data, where structured data is basically numbers and spreadsheets, and unstructured data is everything else – video, voice and all those other multimedia applications.

He believes that enterprise search will be the first element to be integrated into this evolution, with companies such as Google, for example, rolling out technologies to search within videos for words spoken. “These types of search are a really key growth area. Added to that I think the next wave of innovation will be found in the world of content management. You’ve got unstructured and structured data coming together, and we’ll see a lot of vendors currently concentrating on areas like data integration, data warehousing, data quality and business intelligence expand their focus to incorporate this idea of content intelligence – which is all about users being able to ask questions of systems in a user-orientated way, and systems being able to contextualize those questions, search for answers, make sense of all the information and then come back to you in a sort of conversational way. So it’s really like you’re chatting with an extremely knowledgeable human being as opposed to a system. We’ll move away from the technology side of things to a more human-like interaction.”

Betsy Burton, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, believes that BI users will continue to move to enterprise-wide systems that incorporate not only BI, but also customer relationship management, enterprise resource systems and other technologies that can be used in an enterprise-wide, service-oriented architecture. Burton suggested that IT leaders start preparing now for integration of those technologies in a wide variety of applications.

The technologies will use simplified interfaces, such as Google-like search functionality, to enable a wide variety of users to work with the systems without specialized training, Burton suggests. The popularity of search and increasing importance of business intelligence is expected to prompt at least one popular search engine company to enter the BI market.

“No longer can IT organizations ‘push’ technology and applications onto users, but rather users will have to be able to ‘pull’ the sources and resources they need, whether they be applications, information, people or processes,” says Burton. “These changes place increasing pressure on IT to respond more quickly to a growing demand from users for solutions that are easy to use and web-based.”

Other analysts forecast that BI will continue to evolve over the next few years to meet the greater demands of business users. “The evolution of BI will continue to be driven by the business need to incorporate BI-style analytics directly into business process management,” Kurt Schlegel, Gartner Research Director, predicted at Gartner’s recent Business Intelligence Summit in Chicago. “By 2015, BI practices, methodologies and technologies will have become recognized as core and integral components within 80 percent of enterprise applications. Organizations must find a balance between empowering humans to make the right decisions and bolstering their processes with basic, quantifiable optimization techniques.”

Mark Beyer, a Gartner Research Director speaking at the same event, agrees. “Within two generations, every person will have the capacity to customize his work, location, information sources, tools and learning, all outside of traditional constraints,” he suggests. “The future worker, spurred by consumer behavior, social connectivity and an arsenal of personal devices, will create a work environment of infinitely varied options. Ninety percent of companies are already lagging behind the thinking and skills of the future worker.”