Five different kinds of business intelligence
Having recently categorized seven different kinds of database, let me now make a similar effort for business intelligence. To a first approximation, I’d like to split BI use cases into 2×2 = 4 groups, along two dimensions:
- Is there an operational business process involved?
- Is there a focus on root cause analysis?
That could lead to the categories:
- Both operational and root-cause: Real-time monitoring (or more precisely human real-time).
- Operational but not root-cause: Operational BI without that monitoring aspect — e.g., checking whether an expense submission makes sense.
- Root-cause but not operational: Investigative/exploratory BI.
- Neither operational nor root-cause: Monitoring BI without an immediate operational aspect — e.g., checking the dashboard periodically.
Those, in turn, could be more descriptively named:
- Real-time (preferably with a modifier such as “quasi” or “human”).
- Tactical (or task-oriented/-centric).
- Investigative (or exploratory).
- Traditional BI.
To complete the list, I’ll add a fifth category, as explained below.
Notes on those categories include:
- Real-time BI generally is based on dashboards, although push alerting also plays a role (and could play a lot bigger one if the technology got better).
- The whole point of task-oriented BI is to tie it to an operational application, in lieu of a dashboard. This can be wholly automated, e.g. via a rules engine, or have a pop-up interface for a human who’s in the midst of using the operational app.
- Investigative BI is generally launched from a dashboard. Flexibility of drilldown is a key differentiator.
- Traditional BI has been all about dashboards for years, although that’s changing some due to the new mobile form factors.
- At the higher end, third-party BI can be delivered via dashboards. Often, however, it just looks like a single parameterized report. (E.g. Google Analytics.)
The problematic category in all this is traditional BI — i.e., BI that you sort of just look at and don’t do a whole lot with. In an actual categories graph, the “traditional BI” quadrant would be the lower left-hand lame one. So let’s soften that a bit and split traditional BI according to three kinds of user set:
- Enterprise-wide. This is the area where traditional BI really is lame. There’s no way to take a few metrics, sprinkle them across the whole company, and magically transform your business. Yet that’s pretty much the marketing pitch the BI industry used for years.
- Third-party. If you’re dishing out information to third parties, they may be satisfied just to get it, and shallow BI technology may suffice. So I think it makes sense to split this out as a fifth category.
- Departmental. Assuming your organization has some kind of enterprise-wide BI — and by now most do — then why would you want separate departmental BI? Four reasons are:
- You want to do better analysis — i.e., you’re headed into the investigative zone.
- You want to pull in some kind of data that your corporate BI standard doesn’t handle well. In that case, you’re probably in either the investigative or the third-party area.
- You want to meet some operational need. Once again, that takes you outside the realm of traditional BI.
- Not only do you want lame BI — for some corporate political reason, you want your own particular brand of lameness. In that case, you really are in the realm of traditional, departmental BI.
Summing that all up — and subject as always to Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics — I’ll go for now with a five-fold business intelligence split:
- Real-time BI (preferably with a modifier such as “quasi” or “human”)
- Tactical BI (or task-oriented/-centric)
- Investigative BI (or exploratory)
- Traditional BI (which is lame)
- Third-party BI
Related links
- Business intelligence industry trends (February, 2012)
- BI served to third parties (February, 2012)
- Some issues in BI (mobile, departmental, etc.) (January, 2012)
- “Operational” vs. “investigative” analytics (November, 2011)
- Reinventing business intelligence (May, 2009)
- BI segmentation, and an anti-dashboard rant (October, 2006)
- More anti-dashboard ranting (November, 2007)
Comments
11 Responses to “Five different kinds of business intelligence”
Leave a Reply
Love your blog. Love this post.
I wouldn’t call it traditional. It’s not heritage that perpetuates lame BI. And the explosion of new tools is not putting an end to lameness. I am regularly asked to build lame BI by customers that know better and don’t heed my advice.
Politics leads to lame BI. Expose a KPI in a dashboard and if it goes the wrong direction someone gets blamed. Building the real-time or tactical BI to address the issue is someone else’s problem. Somehow this passes for “managing on results.”
Wishful thinking or inexperience is another problem. People believe that having a dashboard at their fingertips, whenever, wherever, will improve management. This promise is what continues to sell lame BI. Hopefully they don’t run out of money or lose faith before getting the BI they really need.
Data quality is a major problem. KPI’s are looking where the light is. To look at root cause in a tactical app requires that you have captured the cause. Real-time alerting requires that some actionable fact be available on a shorter timeframe than the KPI is measured, which is typically weeks, months or quarters.
[…] I’ve never stopped and considered what separates lame BI from quality BI. Curt Monash, in his excellent blog, DBMS2, identifies 2 axes of Business Intelligence: operational and root cause. Into the quadrants he fit […]
[…] I recently proposed a 2×2 matrix of BI use cases: […]
In my opinion we are missing an additional category, BI in your app or how broader solutions can benefit from business intelligence functionality (Dashboards, drill-down, slice and dice, alerts, …) see here a broader explanation: http://www.iccube.com/biStories/vizMattersEndUsers/
Walter,
That sounds like what I called “tactical”.
[…] of technology, discussions of BI can get confused. I’ve remarked in the past that there are numerous kinds of BI, and that the very origin of the term “business intelligence” can’t even be […]
[…] or general communication. Sometimes the purpose is lost to history entirely. This is generally lame, at least technically, unless interesting requirements are […]
[…] July, 2012 categorization of kinds of BI is particularly […]
[…] monitoring-oriented BI needs investigative drilldown, or else it can be rather lame. Yes, purely investigative BI is very important too. But monitoring is still the heart of most BI […]
[…] monitoring-oriented BI needs investigative drilldown, or else it can be rather lame. Yes, purely investigative BI is very important too. But monitoring is still the heart of most BI […]
[…] monitoring-oriented BI needs investigative drilldown, or else it can be rather lame. Yes, purely investigative BI is very important too. But monitoring is still the heart of most BI […]