I have always loved the song “88 Lines about 44 Women” by the Nails. And based on some recent success with a blogging topic relating to the songs of the 80s, I thought that I would continue that theme with “100 Lines about 25 Business Intelligence Topics”. Think of this list, or series of lists, as a wide ranging set of predictions, topics for discussion and observations relating to the business intelligence and data warehousing domain for the upcoming year.
These topics will follow the “domains” and flow of the EMA Business Intelligence Continuum:
- Data Acquisition: Bringing data into a business intelligence and data warehousing environment is the key to any analytical platform as I (as well as EMA’s BI/DW practice) consider data to the new oil for business. This also applies to integrating data for operational platforms such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM)
- Data Management: Once you have that data in a particular environment or ecosystem, you need to manage that data. Whether it be “management” from a storage perspective (aka database management systems) or “management” from a governance perspective (aka data governance and data stewardship), this is an important area that will see growth in 2013.
- Business Analytics: Following on the “data is the new oil” concept from above, what you do with the data once you have it in your environment and under management/governance is as important as is refining oil into various petroleum products such as gasoline and jet fuel. Without that step, the data is just that…. data.
- Knowledge Delivery: While this particular “data geek” hates to admit it, you have to be oriented to a particular dataset to really get into the information. However, many folks either don’t have the time or the inclination to get invested in the tabular format of the data they are investigating. This is where the world of data visualization – reports, dashboards, etc. comes to play.
- Actionable Intelligence: You have analyzed the data. You have presented the data. Now what? If you don’t have a “call to action” or a process that can be impacted by the information in your data, have you really accomplished anything? Probably not. Moving decisions from “reading dashboard” and “send email” is an important and neglected area of BI/DW.
Now, am I going to stake the “pink slip” for my car on these predictions coming true in 2013? Probably not…. However, these are the topics that I think are important in these particular domains and should be discussed.
As such what do the readers think? Are these good divisions to discuss? Have I missed the “projections for 2013” bandwagon with a mid-January release?
I will start my series next week with Data Integration. Come along for the journey.
Provide your comments below and/or ping me via twitter at @JohnLMyers44 with the hashtag #100LinesOnBIDW. FYI – The lines per topic are as I put them in my text editor… Just like gas mileage, your line count results may vary….
NOTE – As I write this, I might just be writing 120 lines total including the descriptors above…. But who’s counting?
