Gartner: Fünf Business Intelligence Prognosen für 2009 und darüber hinaus

Information aggregators will increasingly rely on SaaS to deliver domain specific analytic applications built from industry data they collect and shift the balance of power in the BI platform market in their favour. Companies will only share their data with aggregators that can guarantee security and confidentiality so, while hundreds of information aggregators offering SaaS analytic applications will emerge, a virtual monopoly will persist within each vertical niche because of the high barrier to entry for others.

“IT leaders should work with business users to identify the information aggregators in their industry and plan to incorporate a manageable number into their BI and performance management portfolio,” said Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner. “They should work with the information provider to ensure the information tapped by the SaaS analytic application can be integrated into their internal data warehouses.”

In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with BI Platform capabilities

The emergence of social software presents an opportunity for savvy IT leaders to exploit the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions.

“Social software allows users to tag assumptions made in the decision making process to the BI framework,” said Mr Schlegel. “For example, in deciding how much to invest in marketing a new product, users can tag the assumptions they made about the future sales of that product to a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures product sales. The BI platform could then send alerts to the user when the KPI surpassed a threshold so that the decision makers know when an assumption made in the decision-making process no longer holds true. This approach dramatically improves the business value of BI because it ties all the good stuff BI delivers (e.g. analytical insights, KPIs) directly to decisions made in the business.”

By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through course-grained application mashups

Businesses should not trust their megavendor to solve all their integration problems. Vendors move slowly to integrate the disparate code bases they have acquired. Reliance on one vendor also limits the ability to use best-of-breed capabilities and weakens the buyer's negotiating position. At the same time, business units do not care about grand visions for service-oriented architecture (SOA), such as assembling composite applications by weaving together fine-grained services.

“IT leaders in Type A organisations who want to link analytics with business processes should use course-grained mashups of existing operational and analytical applications,” said Mr Schlegel. “Today, most use portals to integrate operational and analytical applications, but portals simply put the operational and analytical views side by side. Course-grained mashups overlay analytical insights, such as queries, scores, calculations, metrics and graphs, onto the graphical user interface of the operational application.”

“The current economic crisis shows the importance of trust and transparency in the information that organisations use to run their business. Integrate the analytical insights derived from this information into the decision-making processes throughout the company,” concluded Mr Rayner.

More information can be found in the report “Predicts 2009: Business Intelligence and Performance Management Will Deliver Greater Business Value”, available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=842713&subref=simplesearch

About Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009

Gartner analysts will further discuss BI market dynamics at the annual Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in The Hague, Netherlands, 20-22 January. To register, please contact Holly Stevens, Gartner PR, on +44 (0)1784 267738 or at [email protected]. For further information on the Summit, please visit www.europe.gartner.com/bi

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.