In a brief blurb by Jason Bloomberg of Zapthink he writes that the enterprise mashup is the future of service-oriented business applications. Several solid points regarding loose coupling (we do aim to support this in our mashup solutions) and governance were made regarding the required maturity of mashups to play ball inside business. And frankly, I have nothing original to add to those thoughts (as we generally agree) but it did get me thinking about the significance of Web 2.0 (social aspects) and trends in BI.
BI 2.0 is clearly trying to pick up on a theme (hence 2.0) but in my conversations with individuals within IT and creating products around business intelligence they are still blocking and tackling. In many ways, thinking about the impact of social networking or instant service visibility is well outside the daily focus on e-mail report distribution of banded reports and the appropriateness of conformed dimensions. For example, I am certain Gartner’s next BI conference this month will proclaim much success in BI 2.0 and real-time BI but it is not clear in my limited view of the world that the seeming simplicity and power of social networks for content creation and the needs of structured BI performance and big data have really met.
I would say BI 2.0 may be BI 1.5 where at least the user is in control of increasing amounts of information and data exploration but seamless mixing and sharing? I would like to be introduced to those products. Keeping all the cards on the table we at Zua Scene want to offer solutions that help with that mixed and share problem. But really, is having a personalized dashboard or a dynamic dimensional view really BI 2.0? Given the proper environment users will have a lot to say about the quality, quantity and applicability of the powerful views they need and want to drive business but I would say this conversation is barely getting started.
