The Future of Business Intelligence

Jim Goodnight: chief executive of United States-based business intelligence software and predictive analytics firm SAS

However, with the amount of information doubling every year, it's become a constant struggle to make sure that your information systems are keeping up with it and keeping up with all the possibilities of what you could be doing with all that data.

Some of our leading financial services customers have more than a thousand models in place for making decisions on a daily basis, and they have all the latest information included in those models - in some cases, even textual data from call centres. So we are going to see a lot more real-time decision-making and much higher degrees of analytics involved within business intelligence.

In the near future, when executives sit down at their desks in the morning, they will look at their latest performance metrics before they check their e-mail. But if you have a hundred key performance indicators that you're keeping track of - and many companies will require that many - you'll really need an alert mechanism.

Of course, these key performance indicators will be truly reflective of business performance and analytically derived, so people won't be bothered unnecessarily with false alerts. We already have enough interruptions in a day!

They should be investing in an enterprise-wide platform, not just individual point solutions for each department. They really need to take a long look at some of the business intelligence tools they are using currently and consider how they are going to grow. Are they going to have all the analytics available when the time comes and be able to provide immediate answers?

Of course, it will still be vitally important to invest in people with strong problem-solving skills. There will continue to be a strong need for people who have experience in exploratory-data analysis and predictive modeling. This is essential to understanding how to automate processes well and knowing when the approach needs to change so the automation stays current. Companies that "automate and forget" may eventually be doing things faster, but not better. In some cases, they may even be doing damage.

Business-intelligence vendor consolidation will happen. There is a lot of talk about how consolidation scenarios will play out. The truth of the matter is that several of these companies have tried to broaden their product offerings by redesigning products that were not meant to work together.

Jim Goodnight is chief executive of United States-based business intelligence software and predictive analytics firm SAS