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January 6, 2008
Business Intelligence Utopia - Gazing at the Crystal Ball
Circa 2015 - 7 years from now
CEO of a multinational organization enters his corner office overlooking the busy city down below. On flicking a switch near his seat, the wall in front of his/her seat is illuminated with a colorful dashboard, what is known in CEO circles then, as the Rainbow Chart.
The Rainbow Chart is the CEO’s lifeline as it gives a snapshot of the current business position (the left portion) and also figures/colors that serves as a premonition of the company’s future (the right portion).
The current state/left portion of the dashboard, on closer examination, reveals 4 sub-parts. On the extreme left is the Balance Sheet of the business and next to it is the Income statement. The Income statement has more colors that are changing dynamically as compared to the Balance sheet. Each line item has links to it, using which the CEO can drill down further to specific geographies, business units and even further to individual operating units. The third part has the cash flow details (the colors are changing far more rapidly here) and the fourth one gives the details on inventory, raw materials position and other operational details.
The future state/right portion of the dashboard has a lot of numbers that can be categorized into two. The first category is specific to the business – Sales in pipeline, Revenue & Cost projections, Top 5 initiatives, Strategy Maps etc. and the second category are the macroeconomic indicators across the world. At the bottom of the dashboard is a stock ticker (what else?) with the company’s stock prices shown in bold.
All these numbers & colors change in real-time and the CEO can drill up/down/across/through all the line items. Similar such dashboards are present across the organization and each one covers details that are relevant for the person’s level and position in the company.
This in essence is the real promise of BI.
Whether it happens in 2015 or earlier (hopefully not later!) can be speculated but the focus of the next few blogs from my side will zero-in on some of the pre-requisites for such a scenario – The BI Utopia!
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at January 6, 2008 5:00 AM
Comments
I have seen the same thing already on desktops using SSS, WPF and Silverlight on top of several different BI warehouse platforms. Why would there be any delay in providing the above technology?
I know that there are not a lot of WPF and Silverlight development experts yet due to the recent official release of WPF and Silverlight, but I do not see why this would be delayed anywhere from two to seven years, unless you are considering the skill set ramp up.
I have several consultants who are highly-skilled in WPF and Silverlight, SSS, etc. who can provide those types of dashboards now. The gap would seem to be related to efficient and thoroughly developed data warehouses where data has been transformed into something contextually meaningful.
Posted by: Michelle Dear at January 6, 2008 8:16 AM
Thanks for your comment, Michelle.
As you have rightly pointed out, the technology piece of the BI Utopia puzzle is the easiest one to solve - the Process and People aspects are much more difficult to accomplish. My concept of BI Utopia is one where all the core elements of Technology, Process and People work together in a harmonious fashion.
Having said that, even on the technology side, though there have been lot of progress on the visualization side (dashboards, scorecards etc.), there are still improvement areas like Real Time data integration, Operation BI, Reference Data Management, Metadata architecture, etc. that should be in place for true BI Utopia.
Thanks once again and keep reading & commenting.
Posted by: Karthikeyan Sankaran at January 15, 2008 5:22 AM
