The realpolitik of Search and BI project triggers
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
I just attended IDC’s annual Directions conference in Boston, and of particular interest were back-to-back tracks on Search and BI. If you missed Directions in Boston, the West Coast performance comes this week in Santa Clara.
You’ll recall that IDC was the first of the big analysts to publish research on the convergence of search and BI. This line of research began with a chance “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter” moment in the cafeteria. Sue Feldman, head of the search team, and Henry Morris, head of the BI team, were talking over lunch when they realized that the two different areas they covered were trying to solve many of the same business problems using completely different technologies. Their first presentation on this came at their Directions 2003 conference, where Sue included Endeca as one of the first examples of a technology that bridged the two worlds.
So fast forward to Directions 2010. Sue’s track was on “Intelligent Workspaces,” which her team defines as search applications centered on a specific task, not a technology. At their center is an easy UI, but they’re “not just a pretty face,” as she says. They’re a collection of access and analysis tools, like search, data mining, and visualizations, aimed at multiple information sources, all “bundled judiciously” in service to that task. One of several examples she showed is the one below of an Endeca application for supply chain analytics that looks a lot like an interactive BI report, but that is running on top of a semi-structured database.
So far, this should be familiar to anyone tracking this space. But here’s the interesting part. Who initiates the purchase of an intelligent workspace? Sue said that it’s a line-of-business buyer, not an IT buyer, given that it centers on a specific business task. In other words, the person that owns the P&L stemming from that task has the incentive to solve the problem, and that person is not in IT.
Now contrast this to the next session in the track. Dan Vesset, IDC’s VP of Business Analytics Solutions, gave a talk called “Achieving Competitive Differentiation Through Pervasive Business Intelligence and Analytics.” Dan has been a co-author on many of the converged search/BI reports.
Dan also spotted converged search and BI as a growing trend. But he was primarily reporting results from a survey on the BI usage patterns of more than 1100 people. One of the pieces: 5 triggers for new BI projects.
- New executive comes on board. (He or she will immediately ask for new metrics, and will get them.)
- New legislation passes. (Compliance forces new metrics.)
- New performance management methodology rolled out. (New types of metrics roll out with it.)
- M&A or re-org. (Incompatible metrics must be reconciled.)
- Change in growth phase of company. (A regional company goes national and must measure new things.)
I love the realpolitik of that list. I was expecting something about CIOs making strategic investments in BI platforms. But in practice, the urgent interrupts the important. It’s rare that IT has the urgent need to give the business better supply chain analytics.
So 7 years later, Sue and Dan, and search and BI, are still converging. But the economic buyers of intelligent workspaces and pervasive BI are still trying to solve some of the same business problems, but without bumping into each other in the cafeteria and realizing that they’re using different technologies.
Last time I sat down with Sue, I asked her whether she thought 7 years was a long time for converged search and BI applications to show up in use in the Fortune 500. She said it was happening a little earlier than she expected — she was thinking 10 years.
