Business Intelligence is Dead. Long Live Business Intelligence!!

A few weeks ago, I was conversing with the VP of Commercial IT at a large medical device firm on his priorities and the future of his organization. He looked at me and said "Currently everything that we do as a team is create ETL or create Reports & Dashboards. I call it DnD - Dungeons & Dragons. That's where my team is and that's what they do. ETL & Reports. I don't want them to do it anymore. No ETL....No Reports... No Dashboards"

His candor was surprising. Most life sciences clients spend anywhere between $2MM - $10MM each year in building new reports, dashboards or enhancing old ones, yet few question the virtue of staying in the status quo.

Let's face it. Most BI applications see a significant adoption decline post 3 - 6 months and need a defib post 12 months to keep it alive and relevant

So why does it happen? Reports & dashboards are too complex? Too simple? Too dense?Too many KPI's? Take a long time to open? Poor user experience? Do not address everything the end-users want? Users changed requirements at the last moment? The reporting system is not stable? Data quality & trust issues? Poor end-user support?

While these and many more are all valid reasons that we hear time and again, I firmly believe that even in a perfect current state BI system, we would see adoption challenges.

At its core, there are three reasons that plague the success/ utilization of all BI applications

• **Reporting systems cannot keep up with the evolving and varied needs of end-users.** They cannot capture all possible scenarios of how users think, what information they want, the logical series of questions they ask in their mind and how it translates into them using the application. An end-user can be looking at product performance in geography, move on to cross-referencing a primary market research study on customer segments and co-relate effectiveness of marketing efforts on those customers based on current sales performance. They may end their investigation by setting up meetings with key stakeholders. In the current world, this workflow translates the user going into at least 4 applications, a BI, CRM, Market/ Competitive Intelligence Repository, Outlook. This brings us to the second point, which is
• **Users want a unified, personalized and tailored interaction experience to consume their information. **Our experiences of interacting in the digital world of slick apps and smart speakers have raised our expectations of what we want from our business applications. Users want personalized and tailored interaction experiences based on whether they are at their desk, in a meeting, in the field, in their car and so on. In the current state reports and dashboards are the only experience mechanism and limited to interactions on mobile devices (phone/ tablets) and laptops/ desktops. Imagine a meeting room where a key stakeholder enquires about product share in a specific geography. In the current state, a user would open his laptop, log in to the BI site, open the report and navigate to the visualization which helps address the question. Wouldn't it be nicer if there was an Alexa Echo Show or similar device that you could just ask the question and the device would immediately come back with an answer? Similarly, if the user was on the road, a digital assistant type of experience is more useful to ask questions and get answers instead of opening reports & dashboards
• **Users want constant updates to newer and relevant insights to them. **Most BI applications are designed to be a kitchen sink of all possible metrics and KPI's organized in logical sections. They are not designed to be an agile factory publishing newer KPI's or content to the users just as Netflix publishes new movies periodically to keep users engaged and entertained. The unfortunate part is that most clients do not spend any effort in identifying the metrics that matter, metrics that have a causal attribution to the end business outcomes that the end-user is trying to drive. In addition, the end-user is a passive participant of information thrown at them. Inevitably every user will end up having one or two chart/ tables in the report which is all they would look for every week or month when the reports are delivered to them. This trifecta of the absence of metrics that matter, lack of agility in constantly publishing new insights and lack of personalization is the last nail in the coffin for conventional BI application

This brings us to the end of the article on why conventional Business Intelligence is Dead. I firmly believe that none of the current BI tool/s technologies fully solve all of these problems.

In the next article, I would go over what the future of Business Intelligence is going to look like, which tools and capabilities are bringing the future now and the single most important capability that BI tools would need to develop and bring in to usher the future.